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How Group Chats Rule the World

nytimes.com

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Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#61

Post by pavel_lishin »

HaZeust wrote: post #48
mholm wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'solely online' group chat really doesn't seem to be the norm for all but a very specific demographic. It's also very different from what is being discussed in the article.

The demographic is 15-25, by the way. It's not unusual for younger crowds to find themselves in sole-online groups - there's a lot more elasticity and cultural acceptance for that kind of behavior in those groups.

I'm not saying that there isn't a 15-25 demographic that follows this, but I'm also in quite a few only-met-online groups, and I'm entering middle-age. (And, of course, so are most of the other folks in the online-only groups I'm in.)

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#62

Post by jtotheh »

I first had this kind of experience with a BBS in about 1987. Email has been around for a lot longer than that, for some people. I think smartphones really transformed things though, and now I think half the world's population has one. For me, there is a chain of events that led to my marriage of 28 years that can be traced back to that first BBS I was on....

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#63

Post by marssaxman »

Semaphor wrote: post #24
marssaxman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How dismally tiny this all seems! I miss being part of something that felt like a community. I don't know where to find that anymore.

Discord and telegram both offer that?

I'm glad to hear that and I wonder what I am missing. How have you found your way into community there?

In my (limited) experience with Discord, it has worked exactly like a group chat: each "server" has its own fixed membership, and there does not appear to be any larger community. People don't come and go; I have never met anyone on a discord channel who wasn't already part of the group.

Telegram I have never tried; I thought it was a WhatsApp competitor, and I don't know anyone who uses it.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#64

Post by Semaphor »

marssaxman wrote: post #63
Semaphor wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord and telegram both offer that?

I'm glad to hear that and I wonder what I am missing. How have you found your way into community there? In my (limited) experience with Discord, it has worked exactly like a group chat: each "server" has its own fixed membership, and there does not appear to be any larger community. People don't come and go; I have never met anyone on a discord channel who wasn't already part of the group. Telegram I have never tried…

I don't use telegram, but I know others who do, and there are certainly general group chats, though I mostly hear about conspiracy people and crypto.

For discord, it's always an external community for my servers. Either software (home assistant, and a related software netdaemon), a metal review blog (angry metal guy), a game company (owlcat) or a twitch stream (a food truck and a cooking stream). Only my TTRPG group is a closed group.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#65

Post by tonymet »

lxgr wrote: post #54
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…

The AI doesn’t have to be user facing. It can be summarizing , censoring or transforming conversations without a visible agent.

If I send you a message and AI transform it, how will either of us know?

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#66

Post by beeboobaa »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60
beeboobaa wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Thanks, that's really funny.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#68

Post by xboxnolifes »

__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…

None of my group chats send me notifications on message, I just check them when I check them. Still use them all the time. And if something actually needs coordinating, someone drops an @everyone or sends out DMs.

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#69

Post by lxgr »

tonymet wrote: post #65
lxgr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The AI doesn’t have to be user facing. It can be summarizing , censoring or transforming conversations without a visible agent. If I send you a message and AI transform it, how will either of us know?

> summarizing , censoring or transforming conversations without a visible agent.

That would be pretty easy to prove, and if they do so without informing users about it, they could get fined for huge amounts since it would probably constitute a GDPR violation (i.e. saying that everything is end-to-end encrypted but really sending everything through an LLM hosted elsewhere).

Why should they do any of that? What would they gain?

Re: How Group Chats Rule the World

#70

Post by tonymet »

lxgr wrote: post #69
tonymet wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The AI doesn’t have to be user facing. It can be summarizing , censoring or transforming conversations without a visible agent. If I send you a message and AI transform it, how will either of us know?

> summarizing , censoring or transforming conversations without a visible agent. That would be pretty easy to prove, and if they do so without informing users about it, they could get fined for huge amounts since it would probably constitute a GDPR violation (i.e. saying that everything is end-to-end encrypted but really sending everything through an LLM hosted elsewhere). Why should they do any of that? What would t…

for the same reasons all the other channels have it
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