Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

nymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 180 posts

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#71

Post by nathanlied »

Fnoord wrote: post #59
dmitriid wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems. Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad. IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.

> HN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems. > Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad. > IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it. Who exactly is "HN"? How did you even decide "HN" has opinion X or Y? I'm fine with Discord because its mostly used for gaming. Given the previous options (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mum…

I'm not fine with Discord as a replacement for TeamSpeak. I recognise some of its advantages, but the voice quality is absolute garbage when compared to what you can get TeamSpeak to do.

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#72

Post by RankingMember »

chapium wrote: post #57
yzh wrote: post #25

Wechat (from Tencent) has figured it out at least 5-6 years ago. Group chat inside wechat is everywhere in China now. People use it at works, for study groups, or SIGs.

Whatsapp is similar in my experience, at least for chat. Push to talk/listen is popular in china as well and its insanely irritating being around people shouting at their phones to reply.

I was pretty happy when that died out with Nextel phones in the US.

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#73

Post by jamesgeck0 »

qxcbr wrote: post #65
chongli wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't solve the problem of name registration, file/picture sharing, group membership/moderation, customization/emoji, planning, etc. that are handled easily with something like Facebook Messenger groups. IRC is super clunky by comparison.

No emoji/pictures/link previews is a feature to me. You know if someone posts a link nobody's going to click.

There are other groups who heavily use these features. We've got over a thousand custom emojis in my Slack at work. Our interactions would be just slightly less rich without :badpokerface:, :sadpanda:, or :superhero:.

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#74

Post by currymj »

donatj wrote: post #20

When I hit my early 30s a few years ago all my friends moved away and had kids. Getting them together even in a virtual form to do anything in a synchronous way has become basically impossible - it leaves me longing for the days of AIM and IRC when it was very easy to make friends online. I haven’t had a decent conversation with a stranger in years.

you can find discords for many topics that have the feel of old forums.

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#75

Post by pcf »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #68
YokoZar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least your friends don't need a whole lot of instruction to join. Inserting pictures is pretty easy. And it's mobile.

Yes but I currently have discord, hangouts, slack, line, and messenger installed, and have used keybase, signal, and matrix on top of that. It's a bit extreme.

Try Franz to gather many of them in one program?

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#76

Post by noxToken »

dmos62 wrote: post #39
tty2300 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its still easy to make friends online. Maybe you changed.

Could you make a step-by-step guide?

1.) Be attractive.

2.) Don't be unattractive.

Seriously, find a community and dive in. Doesn't matter if it's virtual or facilitates IRL meetups. Reddit is always a good place to start. Lots of those subs have Discord servers for more real time communication. You can even start with a broader, unrelated community like a regional or city-based tech community, and then ask around for people who share similar hobbies.

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#77

Post by otachack »

0b0001 wrote: post #46
downtide wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see Whatsapp singled out in the article or by the parent. But good to know it has a simple UI. There is a comment in the story about cross platform woes and incompatibilities. I've never managed to install Whatsapp on my computer.

You don't /need/ to install it on your computer. Most users won't use it that way anyway, but if you want, you just use the web interface. That doesn't even require any riddles about adding another end-to-end encryption keypair.

For sure, it piggybacks off the mobile device you connect with. It's a really solid, seamless, and easy way of starting a desktop client. I wish Telegram would adapt it as well but the current way it handles isn't terrible (1 time code).

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#78

Post by wlesieutre »

nixpulvis wrote: post #64
wlesieutre wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lack of conversation persistence is a real problem. It's 2019 and people expect to have it. If messages disappear into the ether while I'm not actively connected to the room, it's not going to work for participating in a group conversation. Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonabl…

Well that's the whole idea behind Snapchat, but I get your point. Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.

Not just persistence in terms of "exists after I read it", but in terms of getting the messages at all. When someone sends you a snap while you don't have snapchat open, you get a push notification about it and the message is waiting on the server for you to read it.

In IRC, anything that happens while you don't have an active session just doesn't exist.

That might work for some communities, like programming language groups where I can hop in, talk about something with whoever's online, and hop back off.

But if I'm chatting with my friends and we're trying to make plans for the weekend, everyone really needs to see that conversation regardless of whether they have the client running right this second.

Re: Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again

#80

Post by return1 »

kalado wrote: post #23

I had that thought for months. I'll give you my business Idea for free for the next big social network, since I'd rather work on my game development: Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You can upvote messages and once they re…

> Chats based on hashtags.

> you split chats into channels of ~50

You are describing Kik

Post reply on HN