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Group chats rule the world

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Re: Group chats rule the world

#131

Post by seoulmetro »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #13

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…

Chat group rituals and expectations are objectively the worst parts of chat groups. The same goes for most closed community groups.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#132

Post by bigiain »

andersa wrote: post #126
the_snooze wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Doesn't make sense to require anything offline in the modern world. I'd argue the vast majority of group chats consists of people who have never met, likely live on entirely different continents, and yet have something in common (like they all played the same game together, or work in the same industry, or something like that) and roughly similar values.

There's not a single person in any of my Signal group chats that I haven't eaten, drank, and/or danced with. I very much require "offline connections" with people in my group chats.

In my head, what you're describing is "social media groups".

I have not met most of the people I follow on Mastodon in real life. There is some crossover between my Mastodon crowd and my Signal group chat crowd, but it's fairly small.

I also have a few Slack "workspaces" that are mostly "something in common" groups of largely "not friends, just other people". I am a member of a few web forums which each have a core of people who are becoming or have become real life friends, but include a vast majority of people who are not and will never be friends.

Everybody in my Signal group chats is a friend or at the very least a friend of a friend. In general Madtodon interactions are with "other people", not "friends".

(But I totally get that other people do online and real fife relationships differently to me.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#133

Post by astrange »

verticalscaler wrote: post #111
astrange wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Your problem is you're watching the news, don't do that. (The rate of news articles is pretty much never connected to how much crime there actually is.)

NYC is more or less the safest place in the world; it's certainly the safest place in the US. And the remaining danger is getting hit by cars, not in the subway.

It wasn't like this in 1990.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#134

Post by verticalscaler »

astrange wrote: post #133
verticalscaler wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Your problem is you're watching the news, don't do that. (The rate of news articles is pretty much never connected to how much crime there actually is.) NYC is more or less the safest place in the world; it's certainly the safest place in the US. And the remaining danger is getting hit by cars, not in the subway. It wasn't like this in 1990.

Your problem is that my punching over the internet device is still just a prototype.

It isn't as bad as the literal dumpster fire 70s era either, sure, but good grief what a delusional take. Come visit.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#135

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

the_snooze wrote: post #22

>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.

Please note:

This submission is a blog post from Silicon Valley VC at Andreesen Horowitz about where some of the bad ideas on the internet come from. According to this blogger, they come from SillyCon Valley VC group chats.

It is not a blog post about a shift to private discourse.

If the blog post is true, these VC are likely using group chats to come up with ideas of how to "sell you stuff" and "extract value from you". The chats may be subject to social norms, but _commerce_ is 100% driving the discussion.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am a long-time supporter of peer-to-peer networking amongst small networks of friends and family. But according to the blog post, the VC using group chats are interested in something else: using the internet to spread bad ideas. Further, today's chat apps are generally controlled by companies found in the portfolios of these VC.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#136

Post by sureIy »

mewse-hn wrote: post #103
g9yuayon wrote: post #87

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…

To be fair MSN Messenger went on to lose the western market as well

I wonder whose fault that is exactly. Did it just get neglected or were PMs fighting against “technical limitations”? Sometimes supporting the new shiny feature means breaking the old one. If it’s not clear that the new one is a winner, some might hold onto the “better” (old) one and stale out.

To me it’s insane how MSN Messenger and Skype got left out in the cold.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#137

Post by verticalscaler »

jltsiren wrote: post #120
verticalscaler wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I've seen some communities thrive for decades. Their success seems to come down to a few ideas: Focus on the community itself, not on the people outside it. Underground is always defined relative to the mainstream, which isn't healthy for the community. Don't give the original members any special status. They either fit in, or they move on. The community must reinvent itself once in a while. The world moves on, and t…

That is very rare and admirable. Can you share more details? Perhaps without linking to them as to not ruin it.

Only one I can think of is The Well. I don't see how you could ever recreate it.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#140

Post by theamk »

thegrim33 wrote: post #106
jvm___ wrote: post #24

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.

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,…

I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet.

I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analytics it can. It will remove me from the stores if they don't like me (with the exception of few law-protected cases).

And yet, no one says that the physical world is "already completely overrun by malicious actors", and that somehow "majority of population" does not have the ability to notice that most of the establishments we interact with daily want to make money off me.

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