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Group chats rule the world

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Re: Group chats rule the world

#121

Post by groby_b »

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,…

Sure, if you want to take a purist stance, we should start by inventing a universe free of third parties, to borrow from Feynman.

Meanwhile, the goal of most of these private groups isn't to stick it to the man, or make sure all data is eternally private, but just to talk to each other in a non-public setting. It's OK to use a tool for that you haven't entirely built from scratch.

Most humans, your "the people" (really? in quotes? did you want to write sheeple?), care more about getting on with their life than absolutist stances. They notice just fine, and they adjust as much as they feel the need to adjust.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#122

Post by groby_b »

Harmohit wrote: post #110
bnegreve wrote: post #26

> every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you. There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as the there can be. If you think you're safe because you're already part of one subgroup that complain about the people not included in this particular subgroup, I also have some…

Hahaha, that is so true and so annoying. I am perpetually scared of sending the wrong thing in the wrong group. It gets even worse if the groups have similar names. If only there was a way to filter on excluded members...

If there's a sufficiently large number of people whom you want to exclude, the problem might be that you're simply in the wrong group. It clearly keeps attracting folks you don't want to be in a group with.

And if your group has a very large number of subgroups, it's a sign group health is deteriorating. Side channels are healthy, but if they become the main mode of conversation, congrats, you're starting to develop cliques.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#123

Post by [deleted] »

noobermin wrote: post #28

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…

[deleted]

Re: Group chats rule the world

#124

Post by titanomachy »

noobermin wrote: post #28

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…

My various group chats are each a community of 3-8 close friends I've picked up from different stages of my life. They allow me to keep these relationships alive in between in-person gatherings.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#125

Post by Nition »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #115
haolez wrote: 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…

> the group chat was quickly infested with people trying to sell stuff (cloud services, HR services, etc) In one Slack I'm in, I can usually spot these people within 30 seconds, and as soon as they confirm my suspicions, I grab the banhammer.

Good moderation is certainly a huge factor in keeping a large chat going. Hacker News is a pretty good example.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#126

Post by andersa »

the_snooze wrote: post #45
lukan wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#127

Post by welder »

OJFord wrote: post #66
haolez wrote: 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…

> 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. It's probably not quite as exclusive as you're imagining (certainly not as much as your 256 max 'CTOs 1'), but we're kind of in one a…

I'm solving this in my social network by requiring karma from other networks before someone can post

Re: Group chats rule the world

#128

Post by qrian »

I have such fond memories of talking to interesting people in IRC back in the days. I recently felt an urge to feel such companionship and satisfy my intellectual curiousity with interesting conversation, but found that freenode and libera is mostly dead. Perhaps the success of discord contributed to its demise.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#129

Post by a1o »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #32
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.

It's also a place where people can't easily take what you say out of context to make you look particularly bad. A safe space, in a way.

If the group is slightly bigger, like 20 or more, enough to have people you don't know away from keyboard, then this still can happen.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#130

Post by sneak »

denysvitali wrote: post #82
sneak wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telegram isn’t end to end encrypted and you should uninstall it from your device.

Neither is HN, should I stop using it too? Btw, Telegram is E2E encrypted opt-in

HN doesn’t have direct/private messaging. There is no expectation of privacy in public comments.

Systems designed around direct messaging that don’t have e2ee should not be used; otherwise you normalize surveillance.

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