Once again an SV investor congratulates themselves on figuring out something that any teenager could've told you
Is it wrong to write about something?
If you’re 10+ years late to discover it, best to leave that article in the drafts
Group chats rule the world
31–40 of 194 posts
Re: Group chats rule the world
#32>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.
Re: Group chats rule the world
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please tell more. How was it different than a normal group chat?
Aside from the usual luxury pics, planning trips and events, pics with celebrities, and high society gossip and boiling hot tea, these women are very sexual. Nearly all are married but of course that doesn’t stop them from having their men on the side. A lot of these men look like male models and the chat is littered with nude pics showing off how very well endowed they are. If you’re very good looking with good soci…
> 9 inches or more
Ah, we are talking of internet inches I guess? The vast vast vast majority of men don't have 9" inches or more.
Re: Group chats rule the world
#34> 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…
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.
Re: Group chats rule the world
#35> the great culture wars of 2020.
Well that's the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
Re: Group chats rule the world
#36I used to be involved in several, highly active group chats. Over time these effectively became a concentrated form of social media, i.e. mostly a distraction and waste of time.
I'm on exactly one group chat. Hell that's enough!
Re: Group chats rule the world
#37I 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…
>The best ones are a “forever dinner party” – good friends and conversation happening in perpetuity.
I took the piece as mainly talking about group chats among people who already mostly know each other offline. From my experience, these are indeed really good, because the high barrier to entry keeps weird randos out and establishes a high floor for common interests and understanding. They're an online extension of in-person groups, not a substitute for them.
Re: Group chats rule the world
#38I 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, talent acquisition and so on.
The group became popular and the admin started creating several groups to accommodate more participants. It looked something like "CTOs 1", "CTOs 2", etc
When WhatsApp increased the upper limit, the admin merged all group chats into a single one of thousands of users. There was an effort to use the "Communities" feature to create topic-oriented subgroups, but that's beside the point. What ended up happening was that the discussions plummeted in quality, where a very noisy minority would take up most of the space in the discussions. There were some high profile CTOs that stopped engaging at that point. Also, the group chat was quickly infested with people trying to sell stuff (cloud services, HR services, etc) and the group became a mess.
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.
Re: Group chats rule the world
#39See also "influencer cabals" that specifically manipulate social media platforms, usually organized in group chats on the same platform.
at this point many are managed by agencies which can play that game on their own without even needing said influencers to knowingly and willingly collude
Re: Group chats rule the world
#40>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.
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 the wrong person gets admin rights and their device owned. Not that hard to automate with that many outdated android phones out there.