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I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

blog.danpetrolito.xyz

131–140 of 276 posts

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#131
post #20

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

Our friend group's social contract is to sit in a discord channel (even if empty) if you're open to chatting. Unfortunately we have no real equivalent for text.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#132
post #37

> I also had this idea to turn this into an IoT device that has 5 RGB lights and sits on your desk. It would light up when each friend you have delegated joins your Discord voice channel and you could customize the colour for each friend. If I get some traction I might turn it into a real product, so email me at my email address in my about page if that seems something you'd like. Hah, I'm also building something lik…

While this is a pretty cool hardware project, I would be quite annoyed to be your partner. No offense, but it almost reads as satire that you want to flash LEDs in every corner of the house if your wife doesn't look at her phone notifications quickly enough.

I thought it went without saying that she's on board with it, and that "need to get a hold of her" meant e.g. "I'm trying to call her but she's out in the shop". 99% of our communication during the day is asynchronous.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#133

Going from signal to discord is crazy. How can you be OK with knowing that your personal voice chats are being monitored, recorded and sold to the next highest bidder? How can it be so easy to choose convenience over that? Or is it that we have essentially given up and wanna actively take a part in mass surveillance?

Is there some reasonable way to self host a (secure) voice chat channel?

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#134
I think Discord is the best chat app for friend groups and it's not even close. At this point I've written the following bots specifically for my friend group's server:

# Music Quiz Bot

Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.

The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.

This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.

# Birthday Bot

This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.

# Plex Bot

I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.

# Movie Quiz Bot

Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's wild, and absolutely worth writing about, that at some point in recent years, the concept of "AFK" basically ceased to exist. Yes, we aren't technically near a keyboard most of the time today, but we are never AFK in a conceptual sense. Even when sleeping.

I play badminton, which has games that are about ten minutes long. I've noticed an uptick in the number of times I've had to stop and wait for someone I'm playing with to read a message on their smartwatch. I'm terminally online, but I can disconnect long enough for a game or a film - I seem to be increasingly in the minority.

Honestly I don't hang out with people like that. If you can't put down your Distractify 9000 to play a game with me, then clearly I am not very interesting to you and it's better for both of us to do more engaging activities with more engaging people.

People bristle at this sometimes- they'll ask why we don't hang out as much and I'll explain- and like, I get it, nobody likes feeling called out or criticized, and I don't even mean it as criticism, not really. Your behavior in reaching for your phone tells me that you have more important things to do, and I don't want to obstruct you from them. If those things aren't actually more important, well, then your priorities are clearly out of wack and you should sort that out for yourself.

Like just... stop responding to stimuli. Put things in the order in which they are meaningful to you, and then keep that. You're a conscious being, act like one.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#136
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The clickbait makes you click, and the story is about a cool hack, so you upvote. I don't see how this is unbelievable

hn readers aren't usually so easily baited

Yes, they absolutely are. HN is not as niche as it used to be, and clickbait works on everyone.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#137
post #20

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

might have to put a green dot on a hat or tshirt and try this irl

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#138
post #66
post #20

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

This is something I've always wanted to write about, and I imagine that someday I'll end up with a long article, but basically, it's the idea that the internet used to be offline by default, and now it's online by default. People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to…

Like many who lived through this inversion I can absolutely relate.

I've culled my notifications substantially and my life is better for it. But I miss that feeling of firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi.

I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.

But when I unlock the phone, I want the modem to automatically come back on. I am subliminally tapping into the heyday of AIM. I'm expressing "i'm free. what's up?!".

Problem is, it's not an occasion to anyone else out there. Most people always want to be available and I have a hard time understanding why.

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#139
post #20

Mildly reminds me how being online on AIM or ICQ was an actual invitation to chat. I had so many interesting conversations with people I barely knew. There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.

well part of it was there wasnt ^{10}10 = 10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10^{10}}}}}}}}} more interesting things than chatting with your friends to do online

Re: I built something that changed my friend group's social fabric

#140
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I've always wanted to write about, and I imagine that someday I'll end up with a long article, but basically, it's the idea that the internet used to be offline by default, and now it's online by default. People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to…

Back then Broadcast/Multicast (1 to all/1 to many) was expensive. It quite often resulted in routers and switches catching fire. The chips were too slow. A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained. Today Broadcast is fre…

We used to relay messages in a mailbox once per day and got all new ones (called "Maustausch" https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MausNet). It was pretty cheap because all group and personal messages came in one compressed batch and you had stuff to read and respond for a day. The BBSes exchanged all messages in a tree call hierarchy, you could reach everybody within that one day hop.
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