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I analysed 20 years of my chats
- dwedge 4mo agoDamn this is a nice reminder that even private chats I sent to someone else 10 years ago aren't safe from being harvested by AI
- NDlurker 4mo agoI wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it
- Nition 4mo agoI used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.
- johntash 4mo agoSometimes I feel bad that I lost years of chat history from then too, but you made me realize that might be a good thing.
- hackboyfly 4mo agoThis made me laugh out loud.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- close04 4mo agoI always had enough storage to more or less never be concerned about deleting stuff. I have almost every backup of every phone, computer, relevant app, forum private messages, emails, and so on going back ~25+ years. I found my Yahoo Messenger chat logs and I had the exact same cringe reaction. I didn't delete them but one thing's for sure, my writing style and thinking have changed so much that those artifacts are unrecognizable. This was very unexpected to me because in my mind the changes only happened as I became a young adult. The evidence of these decades of logs shows the change continued to happen as an adult.
- accrual 4mo agoI'm in a similar boat, I previously saved a bunch of AIM chats from my school days but only tiny fragments made it to present day. From those fragments I gather I wouldn't want to re-read much of it. :D
- cootsnuck 4mo agoI have my original gmail address from 20 years ago still and even old youtube videos my friends and I uploaded from ~18 years ago. The cringe is rough but at some point the cringe becomes so bad it loops back around to me just feeling nostalgic and grateful that there's proof I was able to do things, create, be silly, whatever without worrying about appearances so much. Also, I figure if I ever become a megalomaniac then old youtube videos of my teenage self doing parkour should go pretty far in humbling me (although, honestly, I think 13 year old me was way cooler than I am now, so I guess it could backfire).
- freehorse 4mo agoI have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come. Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.
- marak830 4mo agoWell if it's bitlocker encrypted I have some good news (potentially) Yellowkey (CVE-2026-45585) is able to bypass it.
- embedding-shape 4mo agoI was gonna say something like "If it's MSN chats, unlikely Bitlocker even existed at that point" but seems they are actually closer than I remember, only a ~10 year difference when they launched, MSN in 1995 and Bitlocker in 2006. I think me and most of my friends were using MSN all up until the "Windows Live" rename, then I think we started using Ventrilo instead, but looking up the year that was around 2005 sometime. Ultimately, guess it wouldn't be impossible that their MSN logs were encrypted with Bitlocker after all :) I think I started using TrueCrypt around that same time, seems more likely, I think Bitlocker for many, many years was basically only used by enterprises.
- marak830 4mo agoOh I mis-understood, I thought the drive was encrypted not the chats. From my understanding of their encryption, you could brute force the password. It's AES-128 I think? So might take a while xD
- bauruine 4mo agoquantum computers won't save you as they aren't helping you crack symmetric encryption like AES which is most likely used for an encrypted hard disk. https://words.filippo.io/128-bits/ https://words.filippo.io/128-bits/
- jasonfarnon 4mo agoI logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.
- wholinator2 4mo agoDamn, could you still call that person a friend afterwards? Was it normal for them to "wander over" and look through your personal items/computer? I think I'd be pretty furious
- actionfromafar 4mo agoGetting furious over something Kramer does is like getting angry at a dog. Yes, you may get angry but also, dogs will be dogs.
- jasonfarnon 4mo agoActually I was on the defensive. About a month after it happened he said, "Oh I was on your computer and saw a bunch of files where you saved our chats...wtf?" "Um, I just thought,, in the future...it might be interesting to have". Unfortunately that kind of comes off as a blackmail threat.
- Cider9986 4mo agoI mostly text on Signal with disappearing messages so I wouldn't be able to do this. Most people are fine with disappearing messages at 4 weeks, but a few people like to keep their chats forever.
- valzevul 4mo agoDo you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.
- Cider9986 4mo agoYeah I use NotesNook for big notes or projects. I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.
- saligne 4mo agothere's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.
- dwedge 4mo agoI'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?
- Topgamer7 4mo agoI envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bradley13 4mo agoHonestly, it sounds exhausting. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...
- valzevul 4mo agoHi, OP here. No idea how I did it ten years ago, but looking at the Dunbar layer contraction, my active network (e.g acquaintances) peaks at 275 in 2016 and gradually declines to about 60 by 2026, and the close friends layer drops from 9 in 2016 to 5 in 2026.
- danielpardo 4mo agoI would like to do something similar, but I lost a lot of whatsapp historical chats switching phones... Don't think there is a way to recover that.. right?
- dwedge 4mo agoIf you configured e2e encryption beforehand and know the key, you might get lucky with the backup files on your old phone
- defenestrated 4mo agoDo you still have those phones/Android files?
- ashm1104 4mo agoI do wanna do the same, but at times I fear about getting too aware from the insights of the analysis, I fear my opinions my faith might change in certain people.
- iknowSFR 4mo agoOr how about your opinions on yourself? Analysis of your own behavior, done by AI, seems like a a decade of therapy provided by a maybe-good-or-bad psychologist happening in minutes. The impact of that could change how you think about the world by reinforcing biases you hold or weakening strengths by making you self conscious. Ultimately you run the risk of having a computer program redefine who you are as a human and that begs the question of whether you’re really you after that?
- ashm1104 4mo agoExactly! That's another thing, and I don't wanna be way too self aware , I fear it'll redefine me (I know a lot for the good but then also where do you draw the line when a machine starts to redefine you?) Damn strangely good times we are living in, (that's what every generation thought looking around themselves).
- gobdovan 4mo agoFinally, a good use for LLMs. I would be so embarrassed to read old messages, yet LLMs just psychopatically chug along without flinching or cringing.
- sixhobbits 4mo agoI do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app. For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting. You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time. Wordclouds per person are also fun!
- sunaookami 4mo agoHuh, the export function in Telegram Desktop (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/ https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/) is still there. Click on the three dots while in a chat and then Export.
- dotancohen 4mo agoI'm not at the desktop right now. Check if the option to do a full (all chats) export still exists.
- sixhobbits 4mo agoah right, I think that might be what is "Telegram Lite" on the App Store These are the two options I see to download https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/1e133ef5057a949b7ddd92e56689e56f/telegram-app.png https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/1e133ef5057a949b7ddd92e5668... And the 'main' one that I usually use doesn't have export settings that I can find https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/18db23448a373338766bf419fa031db1/telegram.png https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/18db23448a373338766bf419fa0...
- sunaookami 4mo agoAh yeah Telegram Lite is also an official program, but has fewer features.
- 4mo ago
- AdrianB1 4mo agoI don't understand how some people write hundreds of text/chat messages per day. I am communicating by talking to people almost 100% of non-work, most of the discussions are face to face, I write or receive a handful of texts or chats per week, maybe a dozen per month. I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.
- satvikpendem 4mo agoThey're younger than you.
- alexpandey 4mo ago[flagged]
- ZpJuUuNaQ5 4mo ago>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
- DesaiAshu 4mo agoYou still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards
- myst 4mo agoDoing it late(r) only adds to the pain of missing out before.
- vladms 4mo agoJust because you enjoy a thing at a certain time in your life, doesn't mean necessarily that you would or could have enjoyed a similar thing earlier. Besides, social interactions are one of those things that don't depend exclusively on you but also on the environment and on luck. I had better and worse periods, I doubt I could have had only "great periods". Going through periods is how you also learn and get to put some effort to change (the environment and yourself).
- sublinear 4mo agoIn the grand scheme, it's very difficult to miss out on anything. Taking phrases like "when you're ready" as a condescending insult or ego challenge is a stronger guarantee of pain than simply doing nothing. Your own expectations and misguided impressions are most of the pain. There are plenty of bitter and unhappy people who got that way by being delusional. Misjudging one's own experiences and accomplishments is what it really means to "miss out".
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- me551ah 4mo agoAs a hypothetical example, what happens if you could train a custom LLM with your own chats. And it responds to people, and gives the same response as you would. Would that be a form of mental cloning?
- alexfoo 4mo agoThe "Sasha" section brought back a load of memories from my childhood. As an Alex growing up in Western Europe with no connections to anything East it was just my Russophile father that used to call me Sandy or Sasha some of the time.
- quijoteuniv 4mo agoI really though i was your friend… acquaintances… whatever man
- TrackerFF 4mo agoOne byproduct of me storing all my harddrives going back to 2001, is that I also have all my chat logs. Last fall I decided to invest in some HD adapter, as I was looking for pictures of my friend for his 40th birthday - miraculously all drives worked, though some would just power off at random intervals. I decided to look through old IRC chats, and I honestly couldn't for sure say who maybe 30% of the people are just based on their nicknames. Nicknames I hadn't seen in 20 years. So I decided to feed all the raw chats into a LLM, and see if the model could string together names and nicknames. It managed to do surprisingly well! Many of the chats were not personal chats, but from the channels. My most active channels were local groups from my small town, so the names would naturally be named there, but I couldn't be bothered with sifting through the vast amounts of chats/text. I then noticed that in the mid 2000s, MSN Messenger really took off, so most my chats were done there. Or ICQ if I were chatting with people from the US. Then, around 2009/2010 Facebook became the standard (though it seems like my account was created in 2007), and most chats are via messenger.
- valzevul 4mo agoI wish I had kept my IRC logs but I am quite happy the ICQ logs are gone.
- rootsudo 4mo agoThis is a great idea, I was leaning towards doing it with openrouter since the cost now is so affordable then codex but seeing someone else do it, can do it too with WhatsApp, iMessages, facebook, scattered irc logs Also email sentiment too how fun
- ifh-hn 4mo agoWhy do people keep chats? I have none, oldest is 6 months which is when I set my chat app to delete them. I'm the same with emails. Genuinely don't understand why you'd want to keep this stuff. I'd never go back and reread them.
- salviati 4mo agoI'm not sure if it needs to be said, but one thing that is possible only if you keep your old chats is the analysis TFA made.
- ifh-hn 4mo agoThat's a weird reason. Thought process: I'm going to keep all my chats and in 20 years time run an analysis on them and write a blog post about it...
- satvikpendem 4mo agoWell yes, if you see the other comments in this thread it does seem that many have had the idea to save their chats because they knew in the future a more powerful analysis tool would emerge for them. It does not seem to be an uncommon belief especially in the technically minded sphere.
- pingou 4mo agoWhy do you feel the need to delete your chats? Is it to save space? Would you still do it if you had unlimited storage?
- olcay_ 4mo agoI set my chats to be automatically deleted in 24 hours. This way when we have a small argument with someone, there's less chance of someone being triggered/angered by re-reading the chat. Although there have been rare cases where I had big arguments and would've liked to have the receipts.
- pseudopolous 4mo ago[flagged]
- lgcmo 4mo agoVery cool analysis. There is already a selfhosted CRM for personal relationships - monicahq.com PS: but please, just live your lifes
- amythest14 4mo agoany chance of sharing the actual prompt you ended up using?
- MarkWillis 4mo ago[dead]