Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How Group Chats Rule the World

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 86 posts

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#51

Post by ff317 »

Dioxide2119 wrote: post #31

So I'm pretty (very?) young compared to most HN luminaries. I've never even started a company much less did something HN famous like writing the LGPL. But I love to hear these discussions. I'd love to ask the elders this: when did you first start doing group chats, as in multi-user chat rooms with roughly permanent de-anonymized identities? So, I was in jabber IM rooms in my first job, we didn't use cell phones, but…

Personally (as someone who was high-school aged in the early 90s):

1. FidoNet BBSes were one early pre-Internet form ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet ). Even once the early Internet was up and running for some, some of us lived in countries/places where there was no access, and so the loosely-interconnected FidoNet BBS system was the first form of online group communications I was exposed to. There were even some gateways passing email and usenet newsgroups between FidoNet and the Internet towards the end. I had several local friends, we all ran FidoNet nodes, and we did use it for interpersonal communications at times.

2. Usenet - I used this a little bit in the mid-90s for true communication, but mostly that was highly technical in nature, e.g. IETF discussions on protocol development issues, etc. Also lots of using it to download binaries of course, but that's not really chat. I mostly didn't "know" the people I was interacting with, other than by online reputation.

3. IRC - From around 1994 onwards for me (when I finally had real access to the real Internet), on the EFNet IRC network (and a couple others, to a lesser degree). I spent many hours of every day lurking on EFNet's "#hack" channel and several others. There was a real sense of an online-first community, and then there were smaller and often private channels of people you knew from your real life (the other local hackers in your immediate community, or people you met at conferences, etc). I won't defend the culture as necessarily stellar, especially by today's standards, but at the same time, there was a sort of sense of community where it didn't seem to matter much who or what you were in real life, a sort of "if you're here, you're one of us" vibe. I think at least around 1994-1997-ish, IRC was pretty central to my social life (not all of it of course, but still!). Some of it was more anonymous in nature, but a lot of it was people I had met in real life or were even local friends of mine.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#52

Post by lxgr »

internet101010 wrote: post #30
jerojero wrote: post #5

It's interesting that for this journalist the group chat is always an extension and in some way connected to her "real" life. There is not really a mention as to how I, and I believe many other, really use group chats. Yeah. Of course I have a couple group chats with people I know... But these do not compare to the ones that I'm in that have been formed entirely online. The dynamics might be similar but in my experie…

>I think it stems from the fact that for the journalist "group chats" are linked to apple's technology "iMessage". But for me, when I think of group chats I think of discord servers, IRC channels, etc. I mean, Ive been using group chats for years before the smartphone came, and the experience I had back then is pretty much identical to the one I have today. I was the kind of kid that was in front of the computer all…

But also everything feels "on-the-record" in a way that WhatsApp, Signal etc. don't, both in that new joiners don't get to see the previous group chat history (a bug in some scenarios, a feature in others!) and that it's not end-to-end encrypted.

I have definitely observed myself communicating more freely there. In a way, it's "anti-social media", in that it solves one of the biggest (in my view) bugs of Twitter, Facebook etc.: Nobody will pin you down with a direct link to a post about an idea you entertained years ago that you've long since distanced yourself from.

Ephemeral communications to me seem like an antidote to the incredible and unprecedented pressure of having to appear 100% consistent across time and social circles.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#53

Post by Euphorbium »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #22

This author is clearly in a different world than I am. Group chats are strictly for coordinating. If something worthy of conversation happens in a group chat, the subsequent chat happens in a separate channel. Otherwise people start tuning out the group chats and doing the wrong thing like trying to meet everybody at the wrong crag. If there were more than 20 notifications in a group chat in an hour, you can bet that…

I love group chats and have muted most of them. They still work even if someone responds an hour or a day later.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#54

Post by lxgr »

tonymet wrote: post #46

People will always seek out communities they can trust. The web and social media were once interesting but have become phony, conformist and cliché due to aggressive cynicism, commercialization & censorship. Group chats (for now) are places where authentic conversation still exists. Group chats can still discuss creative and unique solutions with less risk to one’s reputation. Soon AI will infiltrate the group chat a…

I really doubt that that will happen. As far as I can tell, e.g. Meta understands the value of WhatsApp, and how some people much prefer it over public social media; no way they'll just burn all of that by thowing a cludgy AI into every group chat that indiscriminately scans all messages.

Tagging an AI in for resolving a quick question or dispute I can definitely see myself using (e.g. getting movie times, resolving a factual question etc.), but if it's anything more than that, I'm out.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#55

Post by JumpCrisscross »

beeboobaa wrote: post #35
massysett wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get it through Apple, cancel anytime through Apple's UI. This does of course require you to have Apple devices. However I am much more likely to subscribe to low-dollar subscriptions through Apple, precisely because I know I can cancel with no issues.

Amusing how to americans apple is the only way to get decent consumer protection. Your government has failed you.

> how to americans apple is the only way to get decent consumer protection

Straw man. I’ve signed up for and cancelled the Times online on my phone with no issues many times.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#56

Post by lotsofpulp »

secabeen wrote: post #43
lotsofpulp wrote: post #23

> In 2008, Apple made it possible to text-message multiple people at the same time, moving limited SMS messaging into their iMessage system — essentially conflating “texting” and “messaging,” collapsing group conversation into a single organized chain. iMessage launched in 2011. MMS allowed messaging multiple people from phones before 2008. Even though I and many in my social circle have had iPhones since summer of 2…

MMS pre-dates iMessage, but even today MMS does not support persistent multi-party group chats. You can create a group MMS, but it's stateless; you can't change the membership in any way without creating a new entry in your chat list; this naturally fractures the community (people using old group chats instead of the one with the current membership, etc.) The specific implementation details do matter; and I think tha…

Yes, the implementation matters, I just found it jarring that two trivially disproved claims from recent history start the article.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#58

Post by beeboobaa »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55
beeboobaa wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing how to americans apple is the only way to get decent consumer protection. Your government has failed you.

> how to americans apple is the only way to get decent consumer protection Straw man. I’ve signed up for and cancelled the Times online on my phone with no issues many times.

GP specifically called out using apple for their consumer protection features. I've seen this many times before. Maybe you disagree, but many other americans absolutely use apple to hedge against a (perceived?) lack of consumer protection laws.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#59

Post by kthejoker2 »

One thing I dislike about social media is the innate urge to "win some Internet points." It just ends up making most if not all content there as shallow dopamine triggers with short shelf lives. Ie the opposite of "deep work."

As someone who's witty (source: self-evaluation) and a people pleaser, I'm certainly not immune to the phenomeneon; I found the only solution is just avoid it entirely.

I'm not sure I appreciate the difference here (group chat to me is just "micro social media") - maybe it just eliminates some of the toxicity that anonymity and scale bring to the equation?

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#60

Post by JumpCrisscross »

beeboobaa wrote: post #58
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how to americans apple is the only way to get decent consumer protection Straw man. I’ve signed up for and cancelled the Times online on my phone with no issues many times.

GP specifically called out using apple for their consumer protection features. I've seen this many times before. Maybe you disagree, but many other americans absolutely use apple to hedge against a (perceived?) lack of consumer protection laws.

> called out using apple for their consumer protection features. I've seen this many times before.

Sure, they make it easy. It's still a straw man to use that to assail American consumer-protection laws, which are largely some of the most robust in the world. (In practice. Not on paper. Plenty of countries have fine models on paper, but they're also easy to ignore.)

Post reply on HN