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Group chats rule the world

sriramk.com

61–70 of 194 posts

Re: Group chats rule the world

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A chance at what? Hahahaha. Ew.

Yeah, what?

"If you're young, handsome, educated, and cartoonishly well-endowed, you might be qualified as a gigolo to an unfaithful heiress!"

Re: Group chats rule the world

#63
>The great culture wars of 2020 meant people, especially in tech, weren’t comfortable sharing their views in public lest they get various online mobs after them.

I don’t think this was a primary motivation. Further, left out Enshittification of the platforms from the bulleted list. I agree that group texts have taken over a lot of functions that used to be served by social media, but this seems like an exceptionally weak and ideologically motivated) analysis.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#64
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would need to be dynamic, since a delay that works for a group of 1,000 would probably clutter a group of 100,000. And if all users post at the exact same time, slow mode doesn't help. But maybe there's value in solving this problem :) Interesting idea!

> But maybe there's value in solving this problem :) Traditional topics/channels? The reason why sites like HN/Reddit ... etc "work" is because you've got to click into the comments on some post to see those comments. You're not going to the hacker news front page and just getting _all_ the comments nor is some algorithm deciding which posts/comments you should see and which you'll never know about. Threads work - to…

Nope, topics don't work. Telegram added topics and you can add them to the group chat, but it killed almost every chat that I have seen add it.

What happens is people start conversations on random themes and this additional friction of posting to the right topic kills the motivation to post at all.

Also, people start to only open topics they like in the group, and close the group if there's nothing to see in these topics. If there were none - they could find something interesting for them randomly, or answer some question, but they just won't find it because they only check topics they like. It also feels more strict, like a confluence wiki of questions/situations and you can't effortlessly chat about something.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#65

>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.

on any public forum you're at the mercy of the whims of moderators, usually unpaid, which can be capricious, or absent, eventually leading to unproductive circular flamewars every time theres a new article on, say, Israel. Having the same arguments and going in circles when there's no new real information is just tiresome for everyone else involved (and some people get really emotionally invested). private group chat, you can tell those people to knock it off, or they're out of the group or slack/discord/zulip.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#66
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 aren't we? It can be done, it just takes substantial effort from a dedicated moderation team.

I helped moderate a traditional forum (Computer Juice, née The Computer Forums) in the late 00s maybe slightly into 2010s, I don't know how 'rich and insightful' it was, that wasn't really what it was about, but it served its purpose for a handful of regulars and guests that dropped by one time for part selection advice or because they had a 'blue screen of death', nothing like HN traffic I'm sure but that too would've been overrun with spam and ads if not for a few of us keeping on top of it.

You can't just set and forget, not with open membership anyway - and something like WhatsApp would probably always struggle with that because you don't have a great way to give much prominence to something Stripe CTO (for example) says vs. the keen doe-eyed cofounder CTO whose also currently the entire engineering team but hoping to make a first hire and talking the talk, sharing lots of random Medium articles on hiring practices and building hypergrowth teams etc.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#67

Earlier 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…

They probably cringe when hearing about my tech nerd group chats, but still eww. The female millionaires I know aren't like this... they must be US millionaires?

Re: Group chats rule the world

#68
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…

There's a paper to be written to do a modern day calculation of Dunbar's number as applied to group chats, where above that, real-time chat simply doesn't scale because of the aforementioned problems.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#69
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…

Caring more about what your immediate family thinks doesn't mean you change your sexual preference to suit them - in fact it's exactly why it would be upsetting that they were 'all homophobes' in that scenario, more so than the fact that there do exist substantially more than [size of immediate family] homophobic people in the world for most, I imagine.

Re: Group chats rule the world

#70
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might just be me, but I actually hate these things. They always feel forced and corny and seeing the notification in a channel and thinking it is something interesting only to have it be another copy paste good morning message is distracting and annoying. I fully acknowledge I may be the odd one out here, as I find any repeated action like this quickly becomes either noise that gets ignored or creates a sense of…

Entirely agree with you. People will walk into the office, say good morning to everyone, then log into their computer and post "good morning" on Slack. Same routine at end of day. Type "good night", then walk around and actually say good night to people. 90% of our Slack history is just "good morning" and "good night", repeated for 4 years. (We're all back in office, and don't use Slack for anything cool)

> 90% of our Slack history is just "good morning" and "good night", repeated for 4 years.

Better write a bot for that! Save your company some serious overhead right there =)

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