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I analysed 20 years of my chats

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Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#101

Post by latexr »

throwfish3000 wrote: post #96
latexr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People will want to be around you if you’re kind and generally pleasant, which is a much stronger reason to hang out with someone and leads to much longer lasting and healthier bonds than a physical trait. It also costs nothing and once you can get into that mindset, takes no effort.

I've always been nice and pleasant, but from my analysis, people thought that was weakness. Weak + Nice = Uncool, Strong + Nice = Cool.

It saddens me that has been your experience. I’d argue people who see kindness as a weakness are not people one would want to be around.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#102

Post by rhines »

latexr wrote: post #99
rhines wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some truth to this, and I'm sorry it's been your experience, but I'd like to gently expand on this a bit as I don't think muscles are the only thing that matter - I know plenty of skinny and fat people with friends. Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When mak…

You’ve crafted a well-meaning response, so I want to preface this by saying I’m not poo-pooing on your response at all. Rather, I want to share some other complementary views. > barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. I’d argue your immediately family isn’t deserving of unconditional love. Unfortunately, familial relationships can be much more toxic than other relationships precisely because y…

Good points, I definitely generalized and you raise important distinctions. I think in general the unconditionality of familial love extends more towards your dependents rather than your parents/siblings - if you dislike your child, it's really your responsibility to raise them better, rather than just abandoning them. But if you have abusive parents or a toxic sibling, you should prioritize your health and happiness.

And it's also true that certain sub-cultures will judge you differently. Like if you're all beefed up and dressed in a suit, you're probably not getting an invite to Dungeons and Dragons club. I would say in general following your country's norms for attractiveness will result in more social success but if you present yourself inauthentically you certainly can end up attracting people you actually don't want to associate with.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#103

Post by palmotea »

rabarbra wrote: post #56
Gigachad wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc. The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.

I'm in a similar situation — 0 friends, 0 regular contacts, 0 significant others in general (though maybe I'm less worried about that than the original poster). So, I have no chats to analyze. What you offer doesn't work for me. I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there. I've now been studying for 3 years at an onsite school (I'm there every evening after work and on weekends) — 0 cont…

> I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there.

IIRC, it's harder than high school to make friends at a university. It's bigger and more anonymous, and outside of student housing there's less free time where students are forced together.

My high school class wasn't too much larger than Dunbar's number (300), and you were getting mixed up with the same kids for 6 hours straight for 6 years.

My university wasn't even that large, and I think there were ~>3,000 kids in my year and plenty enough in my major that it wasn't uncommon (without deliberate effort) to have zero overlap from semester to semester.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#104

Post by psvv »

astura wrote: post #74
DesaiAshu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards

How, though, If you never developed social skills?

I like classes for meeting new people for a few reasons. First, there's a structure around the activity which doesn't force you interact all the time. Second, you're not entering an established group as the one new person. And third, you're all going through a shared experience which naturally helps form bonds.

If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.

But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.

Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#105

Post by accrual »

Nition wrote: post #7
NDlurker wrote: post #2

I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it

I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.

I'm in a similar boat, I previously saved a bunch of AIM chats from my school days but only tiny fragments made it to present day. From those fragments I gather I wouldn't want to re-read much of it. :D

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#106

Post by [deleted] »

ZpJuUuNaQ5 wrote: post #30

>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact tha…

[deleted]

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#107

Post by gedy »

astura wrote: post #74
DesaiAshu wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards

How, though, If you never developed social skills?

It's one of those things: the world doesn't care (unless you are really attractive of course), so you'll have to choose: Do I want to put even more effort into this and/or fake it 'til you make it - or do I want to be alone?

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#108

Post by throw4847285 »

throwfish3000 wrote: post #80
astura wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How?

I avoided people because I was treated badly. Once I got muscles people started laughing at my jokes and treating me well. Working out is the only thing that helped me.

Just to say the obvious, but gaining muscles gave you confidence. People aren't laughing at your jokes more because you're swole. I mean, I'm sure there is some of that. But with any virtuous cycle, it's never just one thing that makes a positive change. It's a reinforcing loop.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#109

Post by valzevul »

sunaookami wrote: post #45
sixhobbits wrote: post #22

I do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app. For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specif…

Huh, the export function in Telegram Desktop ( https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/ ) is still there. Click on the three dots while in a chat and then Export.

In the same app, if you go down Settings -> Advanced -> scroll to the bottom -> Export Telegram data, there is an option to export all chats at once, including some very handy controls like getting only your own messages for large group chats.

Re: I analysed 20 years of my chats

#110

Post by valzevul »

sixhobbits wrote: post #22

I do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app. For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specif…

Hi, OP here!

TF-IDF was the first thing I tried - it works great for stopwords but it doesn't handle cross-language bleed of filler words well, and the short life-event messages ("he died", etc) use common words and get aggressively down-weighted.

I had some asymmetry analysis when looking at directional sentiment and per-person question rates - that's fun indeed!

I also went with the Jaccard convergence and the endearment categories instead of wordclouds, so that I could see how word choices are changing across time.

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