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Group chats rule the world

sriramk.com

151–160 of 194 posts

Re: Group chats rule the world

#151
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 g…

1. My immediate family I meant spouse and children, not parents and siblings. Your point about family of origin is quite important.

2. I'm pretty old. My point is you can't really ever know how other people see you. It's what makes telepathy such an appealing/terrifying idea. You can be very responsive to your friends emotional states and the effect you have on them without ever really knowing how they see you. You might convince yourself you understand when you are young, but as you live longer, you have more situations where you are kind and affectionate to people that you see having a lot of flaws. My friends aren't really judging me, we just have a mutually enjoyable relationship. They know my flaws quite well, but like me anyways.

Tying your friendships to some theories you have about how other people think about you is probably a pretty good way to avoid friendships, especially if you are aiming for some certain standard and avoid or hide yourself when you miss the mark. It's like the old canard about getting a special friend - when you don't need another person, you become more attractive to other people.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A chance at what? Hahahaha. Ew.

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…

I can see where you are coming from. Younger me probably would have loved to be in a situation like that.

Just to go a against the string of harsh negative comments on this.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#153

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…

> very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa) As a Westerner, the Tencent smileys are mostly better. On QQ they animate, which I don't like, but on Wechat they're static and they provide much better options than the Western set. I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though. For some reason, Tencent semi-recently redid all their s…

> I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though.

There used to be one, a serious face that strokes its goatee. That emoji can be used to express doubts or "that's interesting" in a joking way. Not sure why that emoji disappeared.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#155
post #150

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…

This lead me to google QQ's emoji set. Is this the one? https://www.emojiall.com/en/platform-qq If so, absolutely. Kinda seems like every East Asian emoji is more... expressive, cute, dynamic (?) than its western counterpart. I wonder why that is.

I haven't used QQ for years. Now that I look at them, somehow they look less interesting than what I had in memory. Maybe I'm subconsciously comparing them to WeChat's or many of the user-created variants.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#156
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analy…

The main difference being that in starbucks, the customer is the customer, not the product sold, or a combination of both.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#157
post #150

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…

This lead me to google QQ's emoji set. Is this the one? https://www.emojiall.com/en/platform-qq If so, absolutely. Kinda seems like every East Asian emoji is more... expressive, cute, dynamic (?) than its western counterpart. I wonder why that is.

Because western adult people like to draw a thicker line between childhood and adulthood I guess.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#158
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 analy…

I think the sentiment you describe has more to do with alignment of interests: Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party. There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conversing at Starbucks.

> Starbucks wants to sell you coffee, free online services on the other hand want to sell access-to-you to some third party.

That's exactly the business model of shopping malls. They create a fun place to hang out at that just happens to have hundreds of shops.

> There also aren't the same network effects. No one feels obligated to visit Starbucks even though they dislike it due to all their friends/family only conversing at Starbucks.

Most sizeable events have low ticket price but they search your bag for potential food or drinks so that they can sell you their own overpriced ones. You can bring a Kalashnikov but a bottle of water is a big no-no

Re: Group chats rule the world

#160

Tech heads are re-discovering what "community" actually means, after overusing and abusing the term for the last two decades when they actually meant to say "audience" or "network".

You know you're in a community when people help each other move house, for example.
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