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Group chats rule the world

sriramk.com

41–50 of 194 posts

Re: Group chats rule the world

#41

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 neve…

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…

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).

Re: Group chats rule the world

#42

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 a…

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.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#44

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 neve…

#1 and #3 are absolutely terrible and I leave any channel filled with pointless noise like that.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#45
post #40

>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.

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 t…

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.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#46
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).

Re: Group chats rule the world

#47
post #38

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…

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.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#48

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 neve…

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…

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)

Re: Group chats rule the world

#49
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.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please tell more. How was it different than a normal group chat?

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 soci…

A chance at what? Hahahaha. Ew.
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