Group chats rule the world

https://sriramk.com/group-chats-rule-the-world

by srid • 2 years ago

267 181 2 years ago

sriramk.com

pigscantfly• 2 years ago

This is a very real take on where memes 'start' nowadays in the valley.

rvrs• 2 years ago

Once again an SV investor congratulates themselves on figuring out something that any teenager could've told you

woah• 2 years ago

Is it wrong to write about something?

zarathustreal• 2 years ago

If you’re 10+ years late to discover it, best to leave that article in the drafts

pphysch• 2 years ago

See also "influencer cabals" that specifically manipulate social media platforms, usually organized in group chats on the same platform.

throwadobe• 2 years ago

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

Adachi91• 2 years ago

This is prominent in all engagement circles. A few months ago I somehow stumbled into a sex workers chat and it was filled with "Need boosts" and "I mod X, Y, Z subreddit and can get you verified and submission accepted faster". Engagement systems are awful imo, they've always been able to be gamed via click farms but most places can filter through inorganic engagement from mobile click farms in a single region, the "cheap" ones at least.

deadbabe3• 2 years ago

A friend of a friend of mine showed me a group chat she was in of billionaires and millionaires daughters. Wow.

irrational• 2 years ago

Please tell more. How was it different than a normal group chat?

deadbabe3• 2 years ago

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 social status packing 9 inches or more you could have a chance.

citizenpaul• 2 years ago

What is the billionaire daughters platform of choice?

0xcafefood• 2 years ago

Maybe Talkomatic

Muromec• 2 years ago

A secret society without its own special hats, hand guestures and e2e encrypted chat platform just doesn’t take itself seriously

clpm4j• 2 years ago

I 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.

subpixel• 2 years ago

I'm on exactly one group chat. Hell that's enough!

brnt• 2 years ago

I remember I first installed WhatsApp back in, o, 2013? I had held off for a long time, but I had just moved abroad and beggers can't be choosers. I was added to a group chat within 24 hours, and in the following 24 hours I watched all the pointless chatter and I deleted WhatsApp. I'm on Signal now, and the number of groups are under control.

dudus• 2 years ago

I see all kinds of small communities related to programming languages, YouTube creator, frontend frameworks, ... These look fun but I never have time to engage one for long enough to feel like I belong there as a member of that community opposed to just a temporary visitor.

I noticed that Discord is usually the platform of choice but I can see some using other platforms, the platform doesn't really matter much, and it's nice to know you can always drop by to ask questions. But for some reason when it's Discord I imagine it's only kids on the other side, for better or worse.

"I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday"

-- Michael Scott

denysvitali3• 2 years ago

It could be cool to have an HN Telegram group

cubefox5• 2 years ago

We are far too many:

members forever without decreasing quality. Over time, the group decays in quality and I often find groups with >100 members unsustainable.

Though there could be a decently small group chat for sufficiently ancient users.

all2• 2 years ago

We could do cohorts by hashing user uds and bucketing.

localfirst• 2 years ago

don't see it working out tbh

what HN does really well is manage pseudonyms

and its low friction of signing up invites bullies/marketers/trolls

dang and mod teams have done a fantastic job should put out some sort of "community management science"

its tough to build a community from scratch (gone are the days of registering a niche domain + phpBB). you can fake it to a certain degree.

sneak3• 2 years ago

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

denysvitali3• 2 years ago

Neither is HN, should I stop using it too?

Btw, Telegram is E2E encrypted opt-in

aaron695• 2 years ago

It could be cool to have an HN Telegram group

Then fucking do it.

I think it'd probably fail, but it might not. Importantly it allows iterations. The side group might be the winner.

My email is in my profile, I'll try for a month, add your dog, there's your group.

I think you'll find "something" already exists. There was a WhatsApp feed. For me it wasn't interesting. Do a search on the archives / Google if you care. Or just do it.

kelseyfrog2• 2 years ago

On shared rituals, the ones I like the most are

1. Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day. It signals that you're continuing to participate and value the group.

2. @Welcomes. When a new member joins, they are @-ed with a welcome message by the users currently present. It helps expand the join->engage funnel. Some groups have a lot of people show up and then never participate.

3. Wednesday, My Dudes. Where the group plays participates in the same weekly ritual of wishing each other a happy Wednesday. See also: Today Is Friday In California.

In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in. Obviously one has to read the room first and get a sense it's the right ritual for the group.

scrollaway• 2 years ago

Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day

Those a certain age will remember UGT ("Universal Greeting Time") from IRC. It's always morning when you enter the channel, always evening when you leave.

adapt_and_laugh• 2 years ago

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 obligation that breeds resentment.

Even discord’s welcome emotes feel super fake and shallow. I’d rather people actually send human messages or not say anything.

Old man rant over.

swatcoder• 2 years ago

You're not alone. I think it depends on what group chat represents for you.

For me, group chats are a way to coordinate with people and share with people. Token or ritual messages do neither of those things and feel like misuse to me. I'd find the GP's group chats to be noisy and obnoxious and I'd be gone in a minute.

Connecting with people is something I do in other ways and by other mediums (and usually involve more mindful effort than token/ritual messages anyway).

ziddoap• 2 years ago

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)

lassoiat• 2 years ago

Everyone is slightly different.

I am the type that likes saying good morning and telling people to have a good weekend on chat.

This is largely for myself. It makes me feel like I am part of the team. It is how I would interact on any team I am part of.

Most other people on the team don't respond and that is perfectly fine. I would say I am more the odd one out than you though. You sound more like the average person who thinks it is kind of stupid so doesn't respond.

nxtbl• 2 years ago

1. & 3. I hate all channels and everyone who does that. Useless and distracting. Hence I never hung around in general chatter channels..

kortilla3• 2 years ago

#1 and #3 are absolutely terrible and I leave any channel filled with pointless noise like that.

mrweasel• 2 years ago

We do the "good morning", if we remember. It's just as much a way to signal that you're present. We're only a few, 5 to 7 depending on the day, and it's via IRC so it's hard to know if people are present or if it's just their bouncer.

It's just a private IRC channel, no bots, invite only and we all know each other from previous jobs or consulting gigs. Once in a while we'll track down an old co-worker who we miss or wonder what happened to, and invite them. Some pop in ever so often, some only once and others have ended up sticking around 24/7 (the core 5/6 people who are almost always around).

With the continued degradation of pretty much everything online that little IRC channel has become my favorite part of the internet. We can talk privately about politics, projects, home life and we support each other in our new jobs.

OJFord3• 2 years ago

I hate 1 & 3. DING morning. (Great, what do I do wi-)DING [...]

At least it's over by about 9.30. Worse is the 'brb's, 'just getting lunch', 'school run' etc. - we're not talking, perhaps haven't talked for weeks, I don't need to talk to you, I don't need anything from you, I don't care where you're going, for all I knew you already weren't there. Just set your actual status if you think someone might give a shit. (You know, next to the one that shows you're online, so I don't need your Morning.)

In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in.

Well, that's the nail in my the coffin of my plan to stop people doing it by not participating!

Oh the final semi-related thing I have to rant about that I obviously don't want to at work/to the people that do it - little emojis with your good morning to indicate your mood? Grow up, the job to do is the same one whether you're feeling rainy clouds or not, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it. (Caveat I'm nobody's manager, obviously if something really bad's going on you might want to mention it to them etc. and that's completely different & fine. It's the declaration of day to day feelings of being on top of the world or having got out of bed on the wrong side that wind me up.)

On many occasions I've wished for Slack to have a kind of 'filter' blocking feature - presumably the authors at least and perhaps others like these messages; maybe I'm even alone in not liking them - it would be good if I could define searches essentially, that if a message matched would be automatically hidden from view and never notify, regardless of @mention or channel notification settings. Then everyone can be happy. (Not just for these kinds of messages, but also say bots too - where some people find value in GitHub bot messages for example, I need to be in the channel, but I use github.com/notifications for all that and don't need or want it in the channel.)

kelseyfrog2• 2 years ago

That's an interesting point. I'd never do these at work where I primarily use Slack.

I do these things in group chats with people I'm friends with and care about and actually spend time with in real life.

wepple• 2 years ago

#2 is one of those things like wishing happy birthday on Facebook: once there’s a hint or automation involved, it becomes absolutely meaningless.

If it’s organic, then it is indeed a great starter

footy• 2 years ago

I know I am not the first person to say this, but those are the types of things that make me leave a group chat.

Then again I don't even "good morning" my partner unless maybe if it's a big day for either one of us, so I may just be way way outside the intended target audience for this type of group chat.

lxgr• 2 years ago

I love group chats, but I’d instantly leave or mute any of them forever if “good mornings” ever became a thing there.

And I’d like to suggest an alternative to a mindless “good morning”: Actually share something noteworthy or check in with the people in there! Share an observation of your surroundings, an article or cartoon that made you (actually) smile etc.

Too hard/time consuming? Then the “good morning” was disingenuous/formulaic anyway and likely served no purpose.

seoulmetro• 2 years ago

Chat group rituals and expectations are objectively the worst parts of chat groups. The same goes for most closed community groups.

cubefox5• 2 years ago

I remember a poll on Facebook where someone asked whether you tend to appreciate or are annoyed by being invited into group chats. Most people appreciated invitations.

gleenn• 2 years ago

In general I loathe them. I feel like they are so distracting. And then people get all spammy in groups intended to be planning groups and you have to scroll back a year to find which hotel room to book or whatever. I have Messenger notifications blocked and honestly don't know how anyone pays attention to so many and also have day jobs.

cubefox5• 2 years ago

But what if you are invited into a rather exclusive group chat?

msie• 2 years ago

Reading this as my iMessage group chat has gone haywire. I'm missing messages or rather those messages are delayed by 1-2 days. Causing chaos as I am asking people to repeat or clarify their messages. Then I get non-sensical messages out of nowhere in the middle of the night because the context is missing.

the_snooze3• 2 years ago

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.

pavel_lishin5• 2 years ago

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.

a1o• 2 years ago

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.

lukan• 2 years ago

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.

the_snooze3• 2 years ago

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 risk of shenanigans otherwise common in the public internet.

fragmede3• 2 years ago

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.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 2 years ago

Please note:

This submission is a blog post from Silicon Valley VC at Andreesen Horowitz about where some of the bad ideas on the internet come from. According to this blogger, they come from SillyCon Valley VC group chats.

It is not a blog post about a shift to private discourse.

If the blog post is true, these VC are likely using group chats to come up with ideas of how to "sell you stuff" and "extract value from you". The chats may be subject to social norms, but _commerce_ is 100% driving the discussion.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am a long-time supporter of peer-to-peer networking amongst small networks of friends and family. But according to the blog post, the VC using group chats are interested in something else: using the internet to spread bad ideas. Further, today's chat apps are generally controlled by companies found in the portfolios of these VC.

Barrin92• 2 years ago

It's an authentic experience.

In many cases its the exact opposite, it's authenticity sold to you as an experience, and thus Clubhouse was born. Exclusivity as a service, about as authentic as Westworld. Which was obviously true for a lot of historical clubs as well, they're often just commercial spaces where you get to feel exclusive and that is most of the draw. It's no accident that so many of these new private online communities are crypto, AI tech or VC centric and were born coincidentally enough when a lot of money poured into them.

If you want to see real interesting things in tech watch Andrej Karpathy rebuild GPT-2 from scratch on Youtube, everyone can follow along. That's authentic technology and science, it's all open these days.

jvm___• 2 years ago

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.

thegrim33• 2 years ago

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, and the majority of the population doesn't seem to care or have the ability to notice. I don't see the bulk of the population doing anything to retreat from it. A subset of the population, that includes myself, sure, but "the people", I doubt it.

groby_b2• 2 years ago

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.

theamk• 2 years ago

I don't understand why some people hate third-party private businesses so much on the internet.

I mean, people often have conversations in coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Starbucks is a third-party private business that only exists if it somehow can make money off of you. I am pretty sure it also does "nebulous stuff" with the data it gets off me - it has my credit card after all, and I am sure it runs all the analytics it can. It will remove me from the stores if they don't like me (with the exception of few law-protected cases).

And yet, no one says that the physical world is "already completely overrun by malicious actors", and that somehow "majority of population" does not have the ability to notice that most of the establishments we interact with daily want to make money off me.

throwaway290• 2 years ago

Except digital gardens and small web blogs are scraped just as well. Whatever is findable is acquired for ML training purposes and used against you.

slowhadoken• 2 years ago

Group chat has been perfected for the last 15 years. Your uncle just hopped on in the last 4 years.

bnegreve• 2 years ago

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 bad news for you.

lanstin2• 2 years ago

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.

dingnuts• 2 years ago

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 gay and they're all homophobes)

as with most things, there's a balance to be struck. Sometimes you should care what other people think of you, if you don't want to be bitter and alone. Other times it's better to let the haters hate.

Harmohit• 2 years ago

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...

groby_b2• 2 years ago

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.

noobermin• 2 years ago

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 atypical now, but I always prefer in person meetings or phone calls and probably always will.

Voice chat is probably better but since that usually precludes being part of a text chat in the first place, I haven't had a chance to try.

the_snooze3• 2 years ago

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.

distances• 2 years ago

I agree, I really don't like chatty group chats. In-person meetings are great as you have very high engagement for a defined time, whereas a group chat has low engagement on a constant burn. Which I find super consuming.

My preferred use of group chats (and 1-to-1 chats too!) is mainly just to arrange live meetings / calls. If a discussion gets going in the chat itself, I'll just have to silence the whole chat for a day or a week and read the messages later in one sitting.

pavel_lishin5• 2 years ago

Chat works for a lot of things but I've never found it to be that great for socialising.

I think it works for some, but not others. I get something like 80% of my socializin' done via my various group chats - but I'm very heavily introverted. (And for what it's worth, I would absolutely loathe voice chats.()

titanomachy• 2 years ago

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.

sunbum• 2 years ago

the great culture wars of 2020.

Well that's the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

standardUser• 2 years ago

Queer people and women see and feel a culture war even if others do not.

immibis• 2 years ago

To clarify: as the victims.

haolez2• 2 years ago

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, 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.

ibaikov2• 2 years ago

I had similar experience on Telegram where groups that grew in size plummeted in quality.

I just came up with the following concept reading your comment: a slowmode, so that people can write once every x minutes, but others who are mostly read-only can give 'points' to those writing messages in the moment to bypass slowmode, basically they are voting for quality discussions to continue.

haolez2• 2 years ago

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!

PhilippGille• 2 years ago

There is https://slowsocial.us for "write once per week", but no upvoting to remove the limit.

SoftTalker• 2 years ago

Yeah there probably are a few hundred great/exceptional CTOs who would find value being in a group.

There likely aren’t thousands. There certainly aren’t tens of thousands.

anal_reactor4• 2 years ago

The problem with community-based moderation is that the group quickly turns into an echo chamber

OJFord3• 2 years ago

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.

welder3• 2 years ago

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

fragmede3• 2 years ago

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.

verticalscaler7• 2 years ago

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.

You can't keep sales people a.k.a phonies away it will always happen. Every underground subculture gets appropriated as soon as even one of these people shows up.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_punk_subculture

Imagine you run into Patti Smith and her friends in the 70s, if you're lame you won't be staying long. In fact you might get punched in the face. There is proper gatekeeping.

Once the scene grows even a little there's money to be made. A different sort shows up who understands the culture and likes the music OK but don't truly give a fuck it is about selling t-shirts and bootlegs for them. And/Or getting laid.

They'll start promoting it to grow it bigger and make more money. That's when the real sharks show up and the original members start leaving. Later still normies shop your style at the mall with no idea what any of it means or where it came from.

Sadly, can't punch people in the face over the internet. Even worse everything is all about forced inclusivity now.

This ain't a technological problem.

astrange3• 2 years ago

Sadly, can't punch people in the face over the internet. Even worse everything is all about forced inclusivity now.

Nobody is going to do that anymore because we don't all have lead poisoning from gasoline fumes.

pavel_lishin5• 2 years ago

In a small enough group chat, yes, you can - and you should.

jltsiren2• 2 years ago

I've seen some communities thrive for decades. Their success seems to come down to a few ideas:

Focus on the community itself, not on the people outside it. Underground is always defined relative to the mainstream, which isn't healthy for the community.

Don't give the original members any special status. They either fit in, or they move on.

The community must reinvent itself once in a while. The world moves on, and the original concept will eventually be obsolete.

Keep the key institutions non-commercial and under the control of the actual community. People trying to make money from the community are not a threat. Turning the community into someone's business is.

anal_reactor4• 2 years ago

I think that your comment is spot-on

hamasho2• 2 years ago

Your comment reminds me of the video "All My Homies Hate Skrillex - A Story About What Happened with Dubstep (Reupload)". It's a rant about how the original Dubstep was created and developed from the passion and use of a minimalistic approach in the underground London club scene. Then it became the mainstream phenomenon, and people who didn't care about the original ideas got all the population and credit.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQHQhNq5Tek The original creator seems to have removed their account and this is reupload.

pavel_lishin5• 2 years ago

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.

Nition• 2 years ago

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

dredmorbius• 2 years ago

On the little-lamented Google+, I'd long noted that larger groups often had abysmally poor discussion quality. Most were overrun with self-promoters, scammers, and to an extent, advertising (not officially supported, but certainly present). You can see a similar trend on group-discussion sites such as Reddit.

I don't know what the hard-and-fast rule for "best discussion quality" is, and of course that metric will vary by topic and community. I'm pretty sure that this is strongly at odds with the interests of advertisers, for which the goal seems to be to aggregate the largest collection of eyeballs possible at a single venue or channel.

On Reddit, I've noted that discussion quality seems to tank strongly at some point between ~10k and 1m subscribers. Note that subscribers != active participants, but it's a rough proxy. Looking right now at a subreddit I'd found at least somewhat useful at 100k members, it's now boasting north of 500k and ... while not a cesspit as occurs elsewhere, the overall quality is markedly lower.

I had the opportunity to do some detailed analysis of overall statistics of Google+ groups (over 8 million in total at the time of the site shutdown), and activity vs. other parameters. In particular, it seems that measureable interactions (+1s, shares) scale most directly with post activity rather than total community members, which makes some sense. G+ was around long enough that "subscribers" was only very vaguely related to actual participants (as is undoubtedly the case on Reddit as well). In particular, I noted that the most active profiles also seemed highly prone to going inactive or being deleted or removed (I'm not sure which). I suspect that that was a mix of spam accounts (whether created as such initially or converted / hijacked later), and of simple burnout or disaffection. A recent post about interactions on a blog offered a similar observation, and my read is that each individual interaction is an opportunity to push someone over the edge, and that audience cultivation is a balance of bringing aboard new members whilst minimising loss of old. Blocking dynamics on other platforms (I've witnessed this on G+, Diaspora*, Mastodon/Fedivers, Ello, Slashdot, and Usenet, amongst others) is somewhat similar, and seems to me to great interesting network topologies as connections are made and broken.

I've also experimented with small groups of active members and found that ~50 people really does seem to be a sweet point, though even there perhaps 15 or fewer were highly-active participants. (I was the administrator of that group, and knew all the participants, if largely online-only.)

I've also seen small groups persist over years or decades, and watched those stale and spin off members with time. Unfortunately, without fresh blood, that seems all but inevitable, and recruiting new members is a challenge. See groups such as The Well (still extant) as long-lived examples. Many members there are now entering their dotage, if not having passed through the other side of it...

Dave Winer's observation still stands: conversation doesn't scale very well. I think that's innate, and part of the magic when it does emerge.

nvarsj• 2 years ago

Moderation is absolutely essential past a certain critical mass of users (probably 100). So ultimately, the demise of your group is the fault of the admin.

cglong• 2 years ago

Inertia with group chats is surprisingly strong. Following some iOS bug that was causing an MMS group chat to break down, I ran a poll to figure out which platform to move the conversation to. Even though Discord won, no one was using it. Turns out that the iOS users had instead spun up an iMessage chat and were just using that :(

And yes, iMessage was an option in the poll (it came in fourth out of six).

w10-1• 2 years ago

Nice observations.

In my experience, the most important aspect is whether people care about other people's take. At a minimum, care enough to maintain a respected persona, but mainly, to be interested in hearing and adopting or shaping others' approaches. It's the collective production of a refined collective understanding.

If the motivation instead is malice or one-upsmanship or networking or shaping product reputations, the dynamic is less interesting.

As a corollary, I wonder if the governance aspect - of controlling club entry, exit, and discourse standards - has to be animated by the same incentives.

My main application for AI would be analyzing/evaluating discourse to automate or facilitate governance. If it could work regardless of incentives, then there's be less need for exclusivity, and discourse would scale much better.

schmichael2• 2 years ago

I'd like to say it was the 2016 elections, 2020 pandemic, and 2022 Musk acquisition that killed Twitter for me, but the truth is exactly what this article points out: I replaced nearly all of my traditional public social media usage with group chats in that time period. Those events just made the transition much easier!

I use Mastodon occasionally and Reddit only as a passive consumer. I miss virtual communities a bit; as a youth in rural Illinois they were extremely formative for me. I hope disconnected folks still find their virtual communities, public or private, but I think I'm just in a different phase of my life where de-emphasizing them comes naturally. It's hard for me to disentangle whether it's me or the Internet that's changed, but from the positive reaction here and in group chats to this article: I feel safe assuming I'm at least not alone.

welder3• 2 years ago

I've been building a product to bring my Slack conversations to a new social platform [0] but I haven't figured out how to get the same meaningful and deep conversations about tech that happen in private chats.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM

baq• 2 years ago

Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse?

...what?

There is nothing recent about this and there hasn't been any shift. I've had a private chat with the same people on different platforms for more than 20 years now. Then there have been facebook closed groups and the iMessage blue/green segregation fiasco and many, many more.

Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work?

High SNR, shared social norms.

vundercind3• 2 years ago

Why the recent shift?

1) Everything being in public was the aberration. Purely a post-Facebook thing.

2) … and also it was never really true, dig past the surface for almost any interest and you’ll find private forums, private sections of forums, private chat groups, groups of people hanging out IRL and not posting notes online, et c. When has this not been the case?

aborsy• 2 years ago

How do you get invited in good groups? Like, if you don’t have a friend inside already.

schmichael2• 2 years ago

That is their core problem! The good news is that anyone who knows 2 or more other people that share an interest can quickly and easily start a group chat. They're free and if no one ever posts again, nothing lost. I've started group chats around something as momentous and permanent as fatherhood and something as silly and ephemeral as the 2003 film Master and Commander.

miguelazo• 2 years ago

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.

fsmv• 2 years ago

Private chats solve the problem of anonymity allowing people to behave badly. In a chat you have reputation and you get kicked if you're an asshole.

noprocrasted• 2 years ago

It doesn't have to be specific to private group chats. The same model worked well on public forums.

The only reason it doesn't work on mainstream social media is that "assholes" not only still "engage" with the product (and watch ads) but they also cause other people to argue with them and "engage" more, so it's actually profitable to keep them around.

celdon253• 2 years ago

Also has the side effect of incentivizing groupthink, of which the harm outweighs the hypothetical cases where someone’s feelings might get hurt over an opinion

chrsw• 2 years ago

Feels like high school all over again where I wasn't allowed to sit at the "cool table".

fullstackchris• 2 years ago

AI trends started in group chats

what? the current LLM tech is a product of 50+ years of NLP and ML research... it didnt just pop out of group chats somewhere

sangnoir• 2 years ago

No, no, no - the trends are clear: it was obviously crypto first, then AI next, both brought to you by the same benevolent taste-making thought-leadership organized in elite private chat groups. /s

meiraleal• 2 years ago

25 years ago I started coding chatbots to manage a Dragon ball Z IRC channel. Many AI trends started in group chats, yes

fragmede3• 2 years ago

This leads to one of my favorite axioms: 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.

This is directly at odds with the aforementioned moderation. The slack that I'm in has no qualms about warning toxic members of their shit, and making them ex-members if they have to. Thus the only N-1 groups are the positive kind - we're planning birthday things for the excluded member, not toxicly gossiping about them behind their back. It does take a more social aware and heavy handed moderation team, but this is a large group slack which has more features than one giant group chat.

There are private channels there for specific invite-only groups, but they're still focused on a specific topic rather than excluding that one terrible person.

The existence of an N-1 chat is a signal that the group can't do the hard thing and actually talk to that one person.

Seattle3503• 2 years ago

I disagree. I have chats where some people engage in good faith and aren't malicious, but nonetheless they are exhausting at times. You can tell them the rules and they will engage in good faith efforts to follow but the letter and spirit of the rules, but the simple truth is some people aren't "cool" or socially graced.

One of my more social group chats has someone who is both autistic and extremely romantically lonely. He is, as the article describes, "the very online person who is familiar with participating in chat at all times". It is a net positive because anyone can get a response at any time, but they can be a bit much at times.

You can either kick those people out, or take a break from them.

celdon253• 2 years ago

The only sure way to avoid degenerate chat rooms is to stick with topics that are less appealing to degenerates. Trying to gatekeep your way out of those situations is a lost cause because now you’ve admitted that you aren’t there to build communities but rather to divide them for selfish reasons.

Most of us figure that out by our mid 30s and I firmly believe that is a main reason you don’t usually see people over a certain age in that kind of environment. Some platforms like Discord or Reddit can have a network bias effect toward this as well.

jeffrallen• 2 years ago

If I was in any groups like this I'd mute them or leave. Even reading this guy's blog makes me exhausted.

Introverts, unite! And then quietly look at their shoes awkwardly.

g9yuayon3• 2 years ago

Speaking of group chats, I recalled an interesting story how MSN Messenger lost Chinese market. Back in 2003ish, MSN Messenger was THE shit in China. QQ, the competitor of MSN Messenger by Tencent, was losing ground rapidly, especially to white-collar users in big cities. To Microsoft, MSN Messenger probably was a toy, but to Tencent it was life and death. So QQ launched group chat. In addition, QQ Group Chat allowed users to drop any images, including GIFs into a chat. And man, that feature killed. Hundreds of millions of users got hooked. It was just so much fun to be creative and spread memes using this features. In the meantime, what was MSN Messenger's response? Absolutely nothing. No, it's worse than nothing. It was insulting. If I dropped a gif to a chat, MSN Messenger would always convert the gif into a 8x8 icon, and sometimes turned that gif into a static image. BTW, I'm not sure why, but big techs in the US somehow couldn't get Chinese market. Case in point, the emojis in all the chat apps, be it Apple's or Meta's or Google's or whatever, are just ugly and not expressive, when compared to WeChat's, let alone QQ's. Of course, as a Chinese user I'm biased, but that's the point: very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa).

And then, well, there's no "and then". The rest was history. MSN Messenger quickly became a niche and lost its user base. It made Chinese companies realized that they had a chance to out compete behemoths like Microsoft, by moving fast, by moving decisively, and by being creative to fit the psyche of Chinese market.

mewse-hn• 2 years ago

To be fair MSN Messenger went on to lose the western market as well

sureIy• 2 years ago

I wonder whose fault that is exactly. Did it just get neglected or were PMs fighting against “technical limitations”? Sometimes supporting the new shiny feature means breaking the old one. If it’s not clear that the new one is a winner, some might hold onto the “better” (old) one and stale out.

To me it’s insane how MSN Messenger and Skype got left out in the cold.

thaumasiotes• 2 years ago

very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa)

As a Westerner, the Tencent smileys are mostly better. On QQ they animate, which I don't like, but on Wechat they're static and they provide much better options than the Western set. I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though.

For some reason, Tencent semi-recently redid all their smileys in a much uglier style. I wish that hadn't happened.

g9yuayon3• 2 years ago

I don't think there's ever been a good "looking skeptical" smiley anywhere, though.

There used to be one, a serious face that strokes its goatee. That emoji can be used to express doubts or "that's interesting" in a joking way. Not sure why that emoji disappeared.

mlsu• 2 years ago

This lead me to google QQ's emoji set. Is this the one?

https://www.emojiall.com/en/platform-qq

If so, absolutely. Kinda seems like every East Asian emoji is more... expressive, cute, dynamic (?) than its western counterpart. I wonder why that is.

g9yuayon3• 2 years ago

I haven't used QQ for years. Now that I look at them, somehow they look less interesting than what I had in memory. Maybe I'm subconsciously comparing them to WeChat's or many of the user-created variants.

prmoustache2• 2 years ago

Because western adult people like to draw a thicker line between childhood and adulthood I guess.

devanampiya• 2 years ago

Probably falling back to age old IRC might be an option.

AI Might be implemented there as well in future, but not so quick, may be!

kva• 2 years ago

is there anything that VCs will _not_ pontificate on?

pavel_lishin5• 2 years ago

I wonder how Slack/Discord channels change this.

In several of ones I'm in, we have a dedicated channel for topics that are best treaded lightly about - one is called "adult chat", another one is called "taboo". The understanding is that if you cannot participate in a civil manner, you leave the channel, for awhile.

I've had to leave those channels on occasion. The chat, and I, were better for it.

It also helps keeps discussions going, because I know that if I just want to vent, I can head over to #vent. If I need some tech support, I can go to the tech channel. If I want to shitpost, boy oh boy, have we got a channel for that!

qrian• 2 years ago

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.

ehPReth• 2 years ago

must be nice.. :(

seeknotfind• 2 years ago

It's so sad though. Chats are very ephemeral.

kranzky3• 2 years ago

Tech heads are re-discovering what "community" actually means, after overusing and abusing the term for the last two decades when they actually meant to say "audience" or "network".

kranzky3• 2 years ago

You know you're in a community when people help each other move house, for example.

kranzky3• 2 years ago

A good problem for tech to solve is this: How do you turn a bunch of random strangers into a community?

switch007• 2 years ago

Contractors (tradespeople) love WhatsApp group chats in the UK. Instant gossiping (...libel) and blacklisting if a customer doesn't worship the ground you walk on.

celdon253• 2 years ago

A better title for that article would be “gatekeepers rule the world”

gverrilla• 2 years ago

This reads like an elaborate invitation for Ethereum-guy to join author's group chat. And also Erik Torenberg, whoever that is.

sovietswag• 2 years ago

This is an interesting avenue to add to my search of “where the experts hang out”. I tried to reflect on it here: https://josh8.com/blog/mailing_lists.html (As you can infer from the title, I decided that ‘mailing lists’ is one good answer).

I also had a brief discussion about the subject with an older person I respect, and this is what he had to say:

Interesting post. I think you've hit on the central issue: where are the experts? > Back in the day, USENET was kind of the hotspot for that kind of thing; these days, it's mostly cranks and luddites; a few folks are still around, but it's just not what it once was. >The challenge is tapping into the current set of experts; the thing is, TUHS and COFF are great for talking to the older generation, but (and I think that Doug, Ken and Rob at least would admit this) they're mostly retired and have handed the torch off to the next batch. So where are THOSE people? > I think that there is no central online presence for that group like there was for the previous generation with USENET. I mostly chat with them at conferences or idly on social media, but the real work is being done more or less independently. To the extent that folks are communicating about it, I think it's mostly point-to-point. :-(

koolala• 2 years ago

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Group chats rule the world

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