[HN Gopher] Group chats rule the world
___________________________________________________________________
Group chats rule the world
Author : srid
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-06-12 17:45 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sriramk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (sriramk.com)
| pigscantfly wrote:
| This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the
| valley.
| rvrs wrote:
| Once again an SV investor congratulates themselves on figuring
| out something that any teenager could've told you
| woah wrote:
| Is it wrong to write about something?
| zarathustreal wrote:
| If you're 10+ years late to discover it, best to leave that
| article in the drafts
| pphysch wrote:
| See also "influencer cabals" that specifically manipulate social
| media platforms, usually organized in group chats on the same
| platform.
| throwadobe wrote:
| at this point many are managed by agencies which can play that
| game on their own without even needing said influencers to
| knowingly and willingly collude
| Adachi91 wrote:
| This is prominent in all engagement circles. A few months ago I
| somehow stumbled into a sex workers chat and it was filled with
| "Need boosts" and "I mod X, Y, Z subreddit and can get you
| verified and submission accepted faster". Engagement systems
| are awful imo, they've always been able to be gamed via click
| farms but most places can filter through inorganic engagement
| from mobile click farms in a single region, the "cheap" ones at
| least.
| deadbabe wrote:
| A friend of a friend of mine showed me a group chat she was in of
| billionaires and millionaires daughters. _Wow_.
| irrational wrote:
| Please tell more. How was it different than a normal group
| chat?
| deadbabe wrote:
| Aside from the usual luxury pics, planning trips and events,
| pics with celebrities, and high society gossip and boiling
| hot tea, these women are _very_ sexual. Nearly all are
| married but of course that doesn't stop them from having
| their men on the side. A lot of these men look like male
| models and the chat is littered with nude pics showing off
| how _very_ well endowed they are. If you're very good looking
| with good social status packing 9 inches or more you could
| have a chance.
| fullstick wrote:
| Why would I want a chance with them anyway?
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| > 9 inches or more
|
| Ah, we are talking of internet inches I guess? The vast
| vast vast majority of men don't have 9" inches or more.
| kortilla wrote:
| Yes, being rich affords you access to the right side of
| the bell curve
| astrange wrote:
| This is even worse phrasing than when people say "order
| of magnitude more" and mean "more", because it makes you
| think everything is normally distributed, but it isn't.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| A chance at what? Hahahaha. Ew.
| nwiswell wrote:
| Yeah, what?
|
| "If you're young, handsome, educated, and cartoonishly
| well-endowed, you might be qualified as a gigolo to an
| unfaithful heiress!"
| flkenosad wrote:
| Hahaha legit. Blow your life force on losers like that.
| vundercind wrote:
| Having some no-commitment sex for a season or three with
| a probably-quite-attractive woman while enjoying a little
| bit of the kind of luxury hundreds of millions of dollars
| or more buy you and having many of your needs taken care
| of for the duration? Maybe making contacts in the process
| to eventually land some easy money-making gigs that move
| you a couple rungs up the ol' economic-opportunity
| ladder?
|
| Like, if you can swing that and are a younger dude, I can
| see the appeal.
|
| Basically a hand-me-down version of the appeal of being
| married to a rich guy, really, and nobody is confused
| about why _that's_ appealing.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| Thanks, I'm not a male prostitute.
|
| I'll do you one better, I'd _pay good money_ to avoid
| these people. They aren 't any more physically attractive
| then any other cohort of women (not to be mean but some
| of them look like Lena Dunham) and are a nightmare to be
| around.
| gedy wrote:
| > good social status
|
| Seems very low class to me, no thanks.
| welder wrote:
| They probably cringe when hearing about my tech nerd group
| chats, but still eww. The female millionaires I know aren't
| like this... they must be US millionaires?
| vundercind wrote:
| New money / old money?
| deadbabe wrote:
| Millionaires is an understatement. These were extremely
| rich women born into wealth who basically spend their
| lives dressing fancy and traveling the world. Unless
| you're very close to them and in their group chats you
| would have no chance of knowing what they're really like
| behind closed doors.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| What is the billionaire daughters platform of choice?
| Muromec wrote:
| A secret society without its own special hats, hand guestures and
| e2e encrypted chat platform just doesn't take itself seriously
| clpm4j wrote:
| I used to be involved in several, highly active group chats. Over
| time these effectively became a concentrated form of social
| media, i.e. mostly a distraction and waste of time.
| subpixel wrote:
| I'm on exactly one group chat. Hell that's enough!
| brnt wrote:
| I remember I first installed WhatsApp back in, o, 2013? I had
| held off for a long time, but I had just moved abroad and
| beggers can't be choosers. I was added to a group chat within
| 24 hours, and in the following 24 hours I watched all the
| pointless chatter and I deleted WhatsApp. I'm on Signal now,
| and the number of groups are under control.
| dudus wrote:
| I see all kinds of small communities related to programming
| languages, YouTube creator, frontend frameworks, ... These look
| fun but I never have time to engage one for long enough to feel
| like I belong there as a member of that community opposed to just
| a temporary visitor.
|
| I noticed that Discord is usually the platform of choice but I
| can see some using other platforms, the platform doesn't really
| matter much, and it's nice to know you can always drop by to ask
| questions. But for some reason when it's Discord I imagine it's
| only kids on the other side, for better or worse.
|
| "I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday"
|
| -- Michael Scott
| denysvitali wrote:
| It could be cool to have an HN Telegram group
| cubefox wrote:
| We are far too many:
|
| > members forever without decreasing quality. Over time, the
| group decays in quality and I often find groups with >100
| members unsustainable.
|
| Though there could be a decently small group chat for
| sufficiently ancient users.
| localfirst wrote:
| don't see it working out tbh
|
| what HN does really well is manage pseudonyms
|
| and its low friction of signing up invites
| bullies/marketers/trolls
|
| dang and mod teams have done a fantastic job should put out
| some sort of "community management science"
|
| its tough to build a community from scratch (gone are the days
| of registering a niche domain + phpBB). you can fake it to a
| certain degree.
| sneak wrote:
| Telegram isn't end to end encrypted and you should uninstall it
| from your device.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Neither is HN, should I stop using it too?
|
| Btw, Telegram is E2E encrypted opt-in
| _djo_ wrote:
| Not for group chats.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| On shared rituals, the ones I like the most are
|
| 1. Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or
| equivalent at the start of your day. It signals that you're
| continuing to participate and value the group.
|
| 2. @Welcomes. When a new member joins, they are @-ed with a
| welcome message by the users currently present. It helps expand
| the join->engage funnel. Some groups have a lot of people show up
| and then never participate.
|
| 3. Wednesday, My Dudes. Where the group plays participates in the
| same weekly ritual of wishing each other a happy Wednesday. See
| also: Today Is Friday In California.
|
| In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group
| simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent
| behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in.
| Obviously one has to read the room first and get a sense it's the
| right ritual for the group.
| scrollaway wrote:
| > Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or
| equivalent at the start of your day
|
| Those a certain age will remember UGT ("Universal Greeting
| Time") from IRC. It's always morning when you enter the
| channel, always evening when you leave.
| adapt_and_laugh wrote:
| This might just be me, but I actually hate these things. They
| always feel forced and corny and seeing the notification in a
| channel and thinking it is something interesting only to have
| it be another copy paste good morning message is distracting
| and annoying.
|
| I fully acknowledge I may be the odd one out here, as I find
| any repeated action like this quickly becomes either noise that
| gets ignored or creates a sense of obligation that breeds
| resentment.
|
| Even discord's welcome emotes feel super fake and shallow. I'd
| rather people actually send human messages or not say anything.
|
| Old man rant over.
| swatcoder wrote:
| You're not alone. I think it depends on what group chat
| represents for you.
|
| For me, group chats are a way to _coordinate_ with people and
| _share_ with people. Token or ritual messages do neither of
| those things and feel like misuse to me. I 'd find the GP's
| group chats to be noisy and obnoxious and I'd be gone in a
| minute.
|
| _Connecting_ with people is something I do in other ways and
| by other mediums (and usually involve more mindful effort
| than token /ritual messages anyway).
| ziddoap wrote:
| Entirely agree with you.
|
| People will walk into the office, say good morning to
| everyone, then log into their computer and post "good
| morning" on Slack.
|
| Same routine at end of day. Type "good night", then walk
| around and actually say good night to people.
|
| 90% of our Slack history is just "good morning" and "good
| night", repeated for 4 years.
|
| (We're all back in office, and don't use Slack for anything
| cool)
| dualogy wrote:
| > 90% of our Slack history is just "good morning" and "good
| night", repeated for 4 years.
|
| Better write a bot for that! Save your company some serious
| overhead right there =)
| nxtbl wrote:
| 1. & 3. I hate all channels and everyone who does that. Useless
| and distracting. Hence I never hung around in general chatter
| channels..
| kortilla wrote:
| #1 and #3 are absolutely terrible and I leave any channel
| filled with pointless noise like that.
| mrweasel wrote:
| We do the "good morning", if we remember. It's just as much a
| way to signal that you're present. We're only a few, 5 to 7
| depending on the day, and it's via IRC so it's hard to know if
| people are present or if it's just their bouncer.
|
| It's just a private IRC channel, no bots, invite only and we
| all know each other from previous jobs or consulting gigs. Once
| in a while we'll track down an old co-worker who we miss or
| wonder what happened to, and invite them. Some pop in ever so
| often, some only once and others have ended up sticking around
| 24/7 (the core 5/6 people who are almost always around).
|
| With the continued degradation of pretty much everything online
| that little IRC channel has become my favorite part of the
| internet. We can talk privately about politics, projects, home
| life and we support each other in our new jobs.
| OJFord wrote:
| I hate 1 & 3. DING morning. (Great, what do I do wi-)DING [...]
|
| At least it's over by about 9.30. Worse is the 'brb's, 'just
| getting lunch', 'school run' etc. - we're not talking, perhaps
| haven't talked for weeks, I don't need to talk to you, I don't
| need anything from you, I don't care where you're going, for
| all I knew you already weren't there. Just set your actual
| status if you think someone might give a shit. (You know, next
| to the one that shows you're online, so I don't need your
| Morning.)
|
| > In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group
| simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent
| behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in.
|
| Well, that's the nail in my the coffin of my plan to stop
| people doing it by not participating!
|
| Oh the final semi-related thing I have to rant about that I
| obviously don't want to at work/to the people that do it -
| little emojis with your good morning to indicate your mood?
| Grow up, the job to do is the same one whether you're feeling
| rainy clouds or not, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do
| about it. (Caveat I'm nobody's manager, obviously if something
| really bad's going on you might want to mention it to them etc.
| and that's completely different & fine. It's the declaration of
| day to day feelings of being on top of the world or having got
| out of bed on the wrong side that wind me up.)
|
| On many occasions I've wished for Slack to have a kind of
| 'filter' blocking feature - presumably the authors at least and
| perhaps others like these messages; maybe I'm even _alone_ in
| not liking them - it would be good if I could define searches
| essentially, that if a message matched would be automatically
| hidden from view and never notify, regardless of @mention or
| channel notification settings. Then everyone can be happy. (Not
| just for these kinds of messages, but also say bots too - where
| some people find value in GitHub bot messages for example, I
| need to be in the channel, but I use github.com /notifications
| for all that and don't need or want it in the channel.)
| wepple wrote:
| #2 is one of those things like wishing happy birthday on
| Facebook: once there's a hint or automation involved, it
| becomes absolutely meaningless.
|
| If it's organic, then it is indeed a great starter
| footy wrote:
| I know I am not the first person to say this, but those are the
| types of things that make me leave a group chat.
|
| Then again I don't even "good morning" my partner unless maybe
| if it's a big day for either one of us, so I may just be way
| way outside the intended target audience for this type of group
| chat.
| cubefox wrote:
| I remember a poll on Facebook where someone asked whether you
| tend to appreciate or are annoyed by being invited into group
| chats. Most people appreciated invitations.
| gleenn wrote:
| In general I loathe them. I feel like they are so distracting.
| And then people get all spammy in groups intended to be
| planning groups and you have to scroll back a year to find
| which hotel room to book or whatever. I have Messenger
| notifications blocked and honestly don't know how anyone pays
| attention to so many and also have day jobs.
| msie wrote:
| Reading this as my iMessage group chat has gone haywire. I'm
| missing messages or rather those messages are delayed by 1-2
| days. Causing chaos as I am asking people to repeat or clarify
| their messages. Then I get non-sensical messages out of nowhere
| in the middle of the night because the context is missing.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift
| to private discourse?
|
| Because the public internet makes it too easy for people to sell
| you stuff, extract value from you, or harass you. Private chats
| are human-scale environments where understandable social norms---
| not commerce, algorithms, or formal rules---drive the
| interactions. It's an authentic experience.
| jvm___ wrote:
| https://maggieappleton.com/ai-dark-forest
|
| As AI takes over the public internet (the trees) the people
| will retreat to safe underground spaces where they know only
| authentic humans live.
| thegrim33 wrote:
| It's pretty ironic that every one of their "cozy internet"
| site examples requires pumping all of your communications
| through a third-party private business that only exists if it
| somehow can make money off of you, and which can do whatever
| nebulous stuff with your data that it wants. Doesn't seem
| very cozy to me.
|
| I believe the mainstream internet is already completely
| overrun by malicious actors, whether bots or not, and the
| majority of the population doesn't seem to care or have the
| ability to notice. I don't see the bulk of the population
| doing anything to retreat from it. A subset of the
| population, that includes myself, sure, but "the people", I
| doubt it.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| It's also a place where people can't easily take what you say
| out of context to make you look particularly bad. A safe space,
| in a way.
| lukan wrote:
| If the groups get big enough, bots sneak in.
|
| Telegram is good for groups. But the bots are annoying even
| without LLMs. If the APIs get cheap and the bot makers smart,
| they can soon sneak in product placement in semi private chats
| (sport club, etc) where not everyone knows everyone.
|
| Right now the ads are quite obvious ads and scam, still many
| fall for it. So I suspect more invite only groups .. and that
| works, until the wrong person gets admin rights and their
| device owned. Not that hard to automate with that many outdated
| android phones out there.
| the_snooze wrote:
| I think I take a stricter definition of "private groups" than
| simply being "invite-only." Invites are a necessary
| condition, but not sufficient. To me, private groups are
| limited to people who already have an established connection
| offline, or otherwise might just be separated by one mutual
| connection. You need to actually know someone in the group to
| join, and required shared social understanding greatly
| reduces the risk of shenanigans otherwise common in the
| public internet.
| lovethevoid wrote:
| Would agree with this. I have witnessed a smaller private
| group have stuff leaked and scraped, which was interesting
| yet petty drama but the more important angle that relates
| to what you're talking about is that bad faith actor was
| removed and now fewer people get full access.
|
| I think that's the way most groups are going to lean,
| "quarantined" initial access that opens up after whatever
| metrics they deem important.
|
| Of course you can't prevent all bad things from ever
| happening, but it's enough to deter mindless web content
| scraping bots and such!
| fragmede wrote:
| on any public forum you're at the mercy of the whims of
| moderators, usually unpaid, which can be capricious, or absent,
| eventually leading to unproductive circular flamewars every
| time theres a new article on, say, Israel. Having the same
| arguments and going in circles when there's no new real
| information is just tiresome for everyone else involved (and
| some people get really emotionally invested). private group
| chat, you can tell those people to knock it off, or they're out
| of the group or slack/discord/zulip.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Group chat has been perfected for the last 15 years. Your uncle
| just hopped on in the last 4 years.
| bnegreve wrote:
| > every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except
| that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn't have
| such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.
|
| There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as
| the there can be. If you think you're safe because you're already
| part of one subgroup that complain about the people not included
| in this particular subgroup, I also have some bad news for you.
| lanstin wrote:
| You are safe anyways by the "sticks and stones" principal.
| Worrying about what other people think about you, unless they
| are your immediate family, is a pretty inefficient use of time.
| dingnuts wrote:
| this is great advice for people who want to have no friends.
|
| You should care about what the people you respect think about
| you, because they are people you hold in high regard. They
| matter. The key is to dismiss the opinions of people who suck
|
| > unless they are your immediate family
|
| this is a terrible exception. Sometimes your immediate family
| sucks and you shouldn't care what they think of you (imagine
| that you're gay and they're all homophobes)
|
| as with most things, there's a balance to be struck.
| Sometimes you should care what other people think of you, if
| you don't want to be bitter and alone. Other times it's
| better to let the haters hate.
| OJFord wrote:
| Caring more about what your immediate family thinks doesn't
| mean you change your sexual preference to suit them - in
| fact it's exactly why it would be upsetting that they were
| 'all homophobes' in that scenario, more so than the fact
| that there do exist substantially more than [size of
| immediate family] homophobic people in the world for most,
| I imagine.
| noobermin wrote:
| I have learned to avoid group chats. I don't mind actual in
| person groups, but either group chats I've been in have a serious
| veneer of in-authenticity or just sheer group think. I know this
| isolates me from a lot of people especially today who prefer
| meeting on discord but that's okay, it isn't for me.
|
| Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that
| great for socialising. Again, I suppose this is atypical now, but
| I always prefer in person meetings or phone calls and probably
| always will.
|
| Voice chat is probably better but since that usually precludes
| being part of a text chat in the first place, I haven't had a
| chance to try.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >The best ones are a "forever dinner party" - good friends and
| conversation happening in perpetuity.
|
| I took the piece as mainly talking about group chats among
| people who already mostly know each other offline. From my
| experience, these are indeed really good, because the high
| barrier to entry keeps weird randos out and establishes a high
| floor for common interests and understanding. They're an online
| extension of in-person groups, not a substitute for them.
| distances wrote:
| I agree, I really don't like chatty group chats. In-person
| meetings are great as you have very high engagement for a
| defined time, whereas a group chat has low engagement on a
| constant burn. Which I find super consuming.
|
| My preferred use of group chats (and 1-to-1 chats too!) is
| mainly just to arrange live meetings / calls. If a discussion
| gets going in the chat itself, I'll just have to silence the
| whole chat for a day or a week and read the messages later in
| one sitting.
| sunbum wrote:
| > the great culture wars of 2020.
|
| Well that's the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
| standardUser wrote:
| Queer people and women see and feel a culture war even if
| others do not.
| haolez wrote:
| I had an interesting experience with a WhatsApp group recently.
| In the past, WhatsApp groups had an upper limit of 256
| participants. They then increased this to something much bigger
| (not sure how much, but at least 1,000).
|
| Anyway, I was a CTO and was a member of a group chat for CTOs. We
| had very insightful and rich discussions about topics that
| affected our roles, like vendor reputation, frameworks, team
| management, talent acquisition and so on.
|
| The group became popular and the admin started creating several
| groups to accommodate more participants. It looked something like
| "CTOs 1", "CTOs 2", etc
|
| When WhatsApp increased the upper limit, the admin merged all
| group chats into a single one of thousands of users. There was an
| effort to use the "Communities" feature to create topic-oriented
| subgroups, but that's beside the point. What ended up happening
| was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy
| minority would take up most of the space in the discussions.
| There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that
| point. Also, the group chat was quickly infested with people
| trying to sell stuff (cloud services, HR services, etc) and the
| group became a mess.
|
| This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller
| social networks with very limited visibility that can foster rich
| and insightful discussions (although this sounds like forums from
| the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the sales people
| away, or at least invite-only.
| ibaikov wrote:
| I had similar experience on Telegram where groups that grew in
| size plummeted in quality.
|
| I just came up with the following concept reading your comment:
| a slowmode, so that people can write once every x minutes, but
| others who are mostly read-only can give 'points' to those
| writing messages in the moment to bypass slowmode, basically
| they are voting for quality discussions to continue.
| haolez wrote:
| This would need to be dynamic, since a delay that works for a
| group of 1,000 would probably clutter a group of 100,000. And
| if all users post at the exact same time, slow mode doesn't
| help.
|
| But maybe there's value in solving this problem :)
|
| Interesting idea!
| baby_souffle wrote:
| > But maybe there's value in solving this problem :)
|
| Traditional topics/channels?
|
| The reason why sites like HN/Reddit ... etc "work" is
| because you've got to click into the comments on some post
| to see those comments. You're not going to the hacker news
| front page and just getting _all_ the comments nor is some
| algorithm deciding which posts/comments you should see and
| which you'll never know about.
|
| Threads work - to a point - but at some meaningful scale,
| you need all these CTOs on a server with sub-sets of them
| in various channels dedicated to particular conversational
| themes.
|
| The more accessible a community becomes, the more important
| consistent moderation is... otherwise it'll just go
| downhill fast.
| ibaikov wrote:
| Nope, topics don't work. Telegram added topics and you
| can add them to the group chat, but it killed almost
| every chat that I have seen add it.
|
| What happens is people start conversations on random
| themes and this additional friction of posting to the
| right topic kills the motivation to post at all.
|
| Also, people start to only open topics they like in the
| group, and close the group if there's nothing to see in
| these topics. If there were none - they could find
| something interesting for them randomly, or answer some
| question, but they just won't find it because they only
| check topics they like. It also feels more strict, like a
| confluence wiki of questions/situations and you can't
| effortlessly chat about something.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| There is https://slowsocial.us for "write once per week", but
| no upvoting to remove the limit.
| OJFord wrote:
| > This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller
| social networks with very limited visibility that can foster
| rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like
| forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the
| sales people away, or at least invite-only.
|
| It's probably not quite as exclusive as you're imagining
| (certainly not as much as your 256 max 'CTOs 1'), but we're
| kind of in one aren't we? It can be done, it just takes
| substantial effort from a dedicated moderation team.
|
| I helped moderate a traditional forum (Computer Juice, nee The
| Computer Forums) in the late 00s maybe slightly into 2010s, I
| don't know how 'rich and insightful' it was, that wasn't really
| what it was about, but it served its purpose for a handful of
| regulars and guests that dropped by one time for part selection
| advice or because they had a 'blue screen of death', nothing
| like HN traffic I'm sure but that too would've been overrun
| with spam and ads if not for a few of us keeping on top of it.
|
| You can't just set and forget, not with open membership anyway
| - and something like WhatsApp would probably always struggle
| with that because you don't have a great way to give much
| prominence to something Stripe CTO (for example) says vs. the
| keen doe-eyed cofounder CTO whose also currently the entire
| engineering team but hoping to make a first hire and talking
| the talk, sharing lots of random Medium articles on hiring
| practices and building hypergrowth teams etc.
| fragmede wrote:
| There's a paper to be written to do a modern day calculation of
| Dunbar's number as applied to group chats, where above that,
| real-time chat simply doesn't scale because of the
| aforementioned problems.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| > This left me wondering if there is enough demand for smaller
| social networks with very limited visibility that can foster
| rich and insightful discussions (although this sounds like
| forums from the nineties). And if it's possible to keep the
| sales people away, or at least invite-only.
|
| You can't keep sales people a.k.a phonies away it will always
| happen. Every underground subculture gets appropriated as soon
| as even one of these people shows up.
|
| For example:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_punk_subculture
|
| Imagine you run into Patti Smith and her friends in the 70s, if
| you're lame you won't be staying long. In fact you might get
| punched in the face. There is proper gatekeeping.
|
| Once the scene grows even a little there's money to be made. A
| different sort shows up who understands the culture and likes
| the music OK but don't truly give a fuck it is about selling
| t-shirts and bootlegs for them. And/Or getting laid.
|
| They'll start promoting it to grow it bigger and make more
| money. That's when the real sharks show up and the original
| members start leaving. Later still normies shop your style at
| the mall with no idea what any of it means or where it came
| from.
|
| Sadly, can't punch people in the face over the internet. Even
| worse everything is all about forced inclusivity now.
|
| This ain't a technological problem.
| astrange wrote:
| > Sadly, can't punch people in the face over the internet.
| Even worse everything is all about forced inclusivity now.
|
| Nobody is going to do that anymore because we don't all have
| lead poisoning from gasoline fumes.
| verticalscaler wrote:
| wat?
| astrange wrote:
| If you're old enough you might remember Americans were
| much more violent from 1960 to 1995 or so and the crime
| rate was incredibly high in American cities, leading to
| what was called white flight.
|
| Now, if you work with young people (so-called zoomers),
| you'll notice they are absolutely not like this anymore.
|
| At least 30% of this was caused by everyone breathing
| leaded gasoline.
| cglong wrote:
| Inertia with group chats is surprisingly strong. Following some
| iOS bug that was causing an MMS group chat to break down, I ran a
| poll to figure out which platform to move the conversation to.
| Even though Discord won, no one was using it. Turns out that the
| iOS users had instead spun up an iMessage chat and were just
| using that :(
|
| And yes, iMessage was an option in the poll (it came in fourth
| out of six).
| w10-1 wrote:
| Nice observations.
|
| In my experience, the most important aspect is whether people
| care about other people's take. At a minimum, care enough to
| maintain a respected persona, but mainly, to be interested in
| hearing and adopting or shaping others' approaches. It's the
| collective production of a refined collective understanding.
|
| If the motivation instead is malice or one-upsmanship or
| networking or shaping product reputations, the dynamic is less
| interesting.
|
| As a corollary, I wonder if the governance aspect - of
| controlling club entry, exit, and discourse standards - has to be
| animated by the same incentives.
|
| My main application for AI would be analyzing/evaluating
| discourse to automate or facilitate governance. If it could work
| regardless of incentives, then there's be less need for
| exclusivity, and discourse would scale much better.
| schmichael wrote:
| I'd like to say it was the 2016 elections, 2020 pandemic, and
| 2022 Musk acquisition that killed Twitter for me, but the truth
| is exactly what this article points out: I replaced nearly all of
| my traditional public social media usage with group chats in that
| time period. Those events just made the transition much easier!
|
| I use Mastodon occasionally and Reddit only as a passive
| consumer. I miss virtual communities a bit; as a youth in rural
| Illinois they were extremely formative for me. I hope
| disconnected folks still find their virtual communities, public
| or private, but I think I'm just in a different phase of my life
| where de-emphasizing them comes naturally. It's hard for me to
| disentangle whether it's me or the Internet that's changed, but
| from the positive reaction here and in group chats to this
| article: I feel safe assuming I'm at least not alone.
| welder wrote:
| I've been building a product to bring my Slack conversations to a
| new social platform [0] but I haven't figured out how to get the
| same meaningful and deep conversations about tech that happen in
| private chats.
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM
| baq wrote:
| > Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift
| to private discourse?
|
| ...what?
|
| There is nothing recent about this and there hasn't been any
| shift. I've had a private chat with the same people on different
| platforms for more than 20 years now. Then there have been
| facebook closed groups and the iMessage blue/green segregation
| fiasco and many, many more.
|
| > Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work?
|
| High SNR, shared social norms.
| vundercind wrote:
| Why the recent shift?
|
| 1) Everything being in public was the aberration. Purely a post-
| Facebook thing.
|
| 2) ... and also it was never really true, dig past the surface
| for almost any interest and you'll find private forums, private
| _sections_ of forums, private chat groups, groups of people
| hanging out IRL and not posting notes online, et c. When has this
| not been the case?
| aborsy wrote:
| How do you get invited in good groups? Like, if you don't have a
| friend inside already.
| schmichael wrote:
| That is their core problem! The good news is that anyone who
| knows 2 or more other people that share an interest can quickly
| and easily start a group chat. They're free and if no one ever
| posts again, nothing lost. I've started group chats around
| something as momentous and permanent as fatherhood and
| something as silly and ephemeral as the 2003 film Master and
| Commander.
| miguelazo wrote:
| >The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech,
| weren't comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get
| various online mobs after them.
|
| I don't think this was a primary motivation. Further, left out
| Enshittification of the platforms from the bulleted list. I agree
| that group texts have taken over a lot of functions that used to
| be served by social media, but this seems like an exceptionally
| weak and ideologically motivated) analysis.
| fsmv wrote:
| Private chats solve the problem of anonymity allowing people to
| behave badly. In a chat you have reputation and you get kicked if
| you're an asshole.
| noprocrasted wrote:
| It doesn't have to be specific to private group chats. The same
| model worked well on public forums.
|
| The only reason it doesn't work on mainstream social media is
| that "assholes" not only still "engage" with the product (and
| watch ads) but they also cause other people to argue with them
| and "engage" more, so it's actually profitable to keep them
| around.
| chrsw wrote:
| Feels like high school all over again where I wasn't allowed to
| sit at the "cool table".
| fullstackchris wrote:
| > AI trends started in group chats
|
| what? the current LLM tech is a product of 50+ years of NLP and
| ML research... it didnt just pop out of group chats somewhere
| sangnoir wrote:
| No, no, no - the trends are clear: it was obviously crypto
| first, _then_ AI next, both brought to you by the same
| benevolent taste-making thought-leadership organized in elite
| private chat groups. /s
| fragmede wrote:
| > This leads to one of my favorite axioms: every group chat has a
| n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if
| you think your chat doesn't have such a group, oh boy, do I have
| some bad news for you.
|
| This is directly at odds with the aforementioned moderation. The
| slack that I'm in has no qualms about warning toxic members of
| their shit, and making them ex-members if they have to. Thus the
| only N-1 groups are the positive kind - we're planning birthday
| things for the excluded member, not toxicly gossiping about them
| behind their back. It does take a more social aware and heavy
| handed moderation team, but this is a large group slack which has
| more features than one giant group chat.
|
| There are private channels there for specific invite-only groups,
| but they're still focused on a specific topic rather than
| excluding that one terrible person.
|
| The existence of an N-1 chat is a signal that the group can't do
| the hard thing and actually talk to that one person.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I disagree. I have chats where some people engage in good faith
| and aren't malicious, but nonetheless they are exhausting at
| times. You can tell them the rules and they will engage in good
| faith efforts to follow but the letter and spirit of the rules,
| but the simple truth is some people aren't "cool" or socially
| graced.
|
| One of my more social group chats has someone who is both
| autistic and extremely romantically lonely. He is, as the
| article describes, "the very online person who is familiar with
| participating in chat at all times". It is a net positive
| because anyone can get a response at any time, but they can be
| a bit much at times.
|
| You can either kick those people out, or take a break from
| them.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If I was in any groups like this I'd mute them or leave. Even
| reading this guy's blog makes me exhausted.
|
| Introverts, unite! And then quietly look at their shoes
| awkwardly.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| Speaking of group chats, I recalled an interesting story how MSN
| Messenger lost Chinese market. Back in 2003ish, MSN Messenger was
| THE shit in China. QQ, the competitor of MSN Messenger by
| Tencent, was losing ground rapidly, especially to white-collar
| users in big cities. To Microsoft, MSN Messenger probably was a
| toy, but to Tencent it was life and death. So QQ launched group
| chat. In addition, QQ Group Chat allowed users to drop any
| images, including GIFs into a chat. And man, that feature killed.
| Hundreds of millions of users got hooked. It was just so much fun
| to be creative and spread memes using this features. In the
| meantime, what was MSN Messenger's response? Absolutely nothing.
| No, it's worse than nothing. It was insulting. If I dropped a gif
| to a chat, MSN Messenger would always convert the gif into a 8x8
| icon, and sometimes turned that gif into a static image. BTW, I'm
| not sure why, but big techs in the US somehow couldn't get
| Chinese market. Case in point, the emojis in all the chat apps,
| be it Apple's or Meta's or Google's or whatever, are just ugly
| and not expressive, when compared to WeChat's, let alone QQ's. Of
| course, as a Chinese user I'm biased, but that's the point: very
| few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries
| (and I guess vice versa).
|
| And then, well, there's no "and then". The rest was history. MSN
| Messenger quickly became a niche and lost its user base. It made
| Chinese companies realized that they had a chance to out compete
| behemoths like Microsoft, by moving fast, by moving decisively,
| and by being creative to fit the psyche of Chinese market.
| mewse-hn wrote:
| To be fair MSN Messenger went on to lose the western market as
| well
| devanampiya wrote:
| Probably falling back to age old IRC might be an option.
|
| AI Might be implemented there as well in future, but not so
| quick, may be!
| kva wrote:
| is there anything that VCs will _not_ pontificate on?
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