I analysed 20 years of my chats

https://drobinin.com/posts/am-i-a-bad-friend/

by valzevul • 2 months ago

255 156 2 months ago

NDlurker2• 2 months ago

I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it

Nition2• 2 months ago

I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.

johntash• 2 months ago

Sometimes I feel bad that I lost years of chat history from then too, but you made me realize that might be a good thing.

hackboyfly• 2 months ago

This made me laugh out loud.

close04• 2 months ago

I always had enough storage to more or less never be concerned about deleting stuff. I have almost every backup of every phone, computer, relevant app, forum private messages, emails, and so on going back ~25+ years. I found my Yahoo Messenger chat logs and I had the exact same cringe reaction. I didn't delete them but one thing's for sure, my writing style and thinking have changed so much that those artifacts are unrecognizable.

This was very unexpected to me because in my mind the changes only happened as I became a young adult. The evidence of these decades of logs shows the change continued to happen as an adult.

accrual• 2 months ago

I'm in a similar boat, I previously saved a bunch of AIM chats from my school days but only tiny fragments made it to present day. From those fragments I gather I wouldn't want to re-read much of it. :D

cootsnuck• 2 months ago

I have my original gmail address from 20 years ago still and even old youtube videos my friends and I uploaded from ~18 years ago.

The cringe is rough but at some point the cringe becomes so bad it loops back around to me just feeling nostalgic and grateful that there's proof I was able to do things, create, be silly, whatever without worrying about appearances so much.

Also, I figure if I ever become a megalomaniac then old youtube videos of my teenage self doing parkour should go pretty far in humbling me (although, honestly, I think 13 year old me was way cooler than I am now, so I guess it could backfire).

freehorse• 2 months ago

I have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come.

Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.

marak8302• 2 months ago

Well if it's bitlocker encrypted I have some good news (potentially) Yellowkey (CVE-2026-45585) is able to bypass it.

bauruine• 2 months ago

quantum computers won't save you as they aren't helping you crack symmetric encryption like AES which is most likely used for an encrypted hard disk.

https://words.filippo.io/128-bits/

jasonfarnon2• 2 months ago

I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.

wholinator22• 2 months ago

Damn, could you still call that person a friend afterwards? Was it normal for them to "wander over" and look through your personal items/computer? I think I'd be pretty furious

Cider99862• 2 months ago

I mostly text on Signal with disappearing messages so I wouldn't be able to do this. Most people are fine with disappearing messages at 4 weeks, but a few people like to keep their chats forever.

valzevul5• 2 months ago

Do you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.

Cider99862• 2 months ago

Yeah I use NotesNook for big notes or projects.

I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.

saligne4• 2 months ago

there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.

dwedge4• 2 months ago

I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?

Gigachad2• 2 months ago

Tbh I wish all messaging apps worked like this. While it’s kind of cool to make charts like this, the privacy implications are pretty terrible for keeping conversations forever.

A data breach on an IM app would be one of the most devastating leaks ever. And there’s just not that many legitimate use cases for keeping all history. If someone tells you something important you can make the effort to move it to their contact or notes in your phone.

darkwater3• 2 months ago

If the chat is truly E2E there is no way a data breach can happen on the server side. The same applies if the app is only saving chat logs locally. [1]

Now, if the threat scenario is someone implanting a compromised version of the IM app on every device out there, and siphoning data from the device itself, then it's a completely different scenario.

[1] although this could be intercepted by an attacker compromising the IM servers, if the app is not distributed/P2P

Topgamer7• 2 months ago

I envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.

bradley13• 2 months ago

Honestly, it sounds exhausting. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...

valzevul5• 2 months ago

Hi, OP here. No idea how I did it ten years ago, but looking at the Dunbar layer contraction, my active network (e.g acquaintances) peaks at 275 in 2016 and gradually declines to about 60 by 2026, and the close friends layer drops from 9 in 2016 to 5 in 2026.

danielpardo• 2 months ago

I would like to do something similar, but I lost a lot of whatsapp historical chats switching phones...

Don't think there is a way to recover that.. right?

dwedge4• 2 months ago

If you configured e2e encryption beforehand and know the key, you might get lucky with the backup files on your old phone

defenestrated• 2 months ago

Do you still have those phones/Android files?

dwedge4• 2 months ago

Damn this is a nice reminder that even private chats I sent to someone else 10 years ago aren't safe from being harvested by AI

ashm11042• 2 months ago

I do wanna do the same, but at times I fear about getting too aware from the insights of the analysis, I fear my opinions my faith might change in certain people.

iknowSFR• 2 months ago

Or how about your opinions on yourself? Analysis of your own behavior, done by AI, seems like a a decade of therapy provided by a maybe-good-or-bad psychologist happening in minutes. The impact of that could change how you think about the world by reinforcing biases you hold or weakening strengths by making you self conscious.

Ultimately you run the risk of having a computer program redefine who you are as a human and that begs the question of whether you’re really you after that?

ashm11042• 2 months ago

Exactly! That's another thing, and I don't wanna be way too self aware , I fear it'll redefine me (I know a lot for the good but then also where do you draw the line when a machine starts to redefine you?)

Damn strangely good times we are living in, (that's what every generation thought looking around themselves).

gobdovan• 2 months ago

Finally, a good use for LLMs. I would be so embarrassed to read old messages, yet LLMs just psychopatically chug along without flinching or cringing.

sixhobbits2• 2 months ago

I do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app.

For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting.

You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time.

Wordclouds per person are also fun!

sunaookami2• 2 months ago

Huh, the export function in Telegram Desktop (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/) is still there. Click on the three dots while in a chat and then Export.

dotancohen2• 2 months ago

I'm not at the desktop right now. Check if the option to do a full (all chats) export still exists.

sixhobbits2• 2 months ago

ah right, I think that might be what is "Telegram Lite" on the App Store

These are the two options I see to download https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/1e133ef5057a949b7ddd92e5668...

And the 'main' one that I usually use doesn't have export settings that I can find

https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/18db23448a373338766bf419fa0...

valzevul5• 2 months ago

In the same app, if you go down Settings -> Advanced -> scroll to the bottom -> Export Telegram data, there is an option to export all chats at once, including some very handy controls like getting only your own messages for large group chats.

dotancohen2• 2 months ago

Was any explanation given as to why the export functionality was removed?

valzevul5• 2 months ago

Hi, OP here!

TF-IDF was the first thing I tried - it works great for stopwords but it doesn't handle cross-language bleed of filler words well, and the short life-event messages ("he died", etc) use common words and get aggressively down-weighted.

I had some asymmetry analysis when looking at directional sentiment and per-person question rates - that's fun indeed!

I also went with the Jaccard convergence and the endearment categories instead of wordclouds, so that I could see how word choices are changing across time.

AdrianB1• 2 months ago

I don't understand how some people write hundreds of text/chat messages per day. I am communicating by talking to people almost 100% of non-work, most of the discussions are face to face, I write or receive a handful of texts or chats per week, maybe a dozen per month.

I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.

satvikpendem2• 2 months ago

They're younger than you.

ZpJuUuNaQ5• 2 months ago

15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances

Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.

DesaiAshu• 2 months ago

You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards

myst• 2 months ago

Doing it late(r) only adds to the pain of missing out before.

astura3• 2 months ago

How, though, If you never developed social skills?

Gigachad2• 2 months ago

My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc.

The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.

mgh22• 2 months ago

This largely depends on luck, though it can improve your chances. There are places where you can be a regular your entire life and never meet a meaningful person, while at other times, simply being in the right place at the right time can lead you to someone with whom you develop a lifelong relationship.

rabarbra• 2 months ago

I'm in a similar situation — 0 friends, 0 regular contacts, 0 significant others in general (though maybe I'm less worried about that than the original poster). So, I have no chats to analyze. What you offer doesn't work for me. I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there. I've now been studying for 3 years at an onsite school (I'm there every evening after work and on weekends) — 0 contacts/friends. I moderated a support group weekly for 3 years — 0 contacts/friends. I worked at 4 non-remote jobs, at least 2 years each — 0 contacts/friends.

F3nd0• 2 months ago

The internet offers less means to bond (mostly a subset of what you get in real life), but the quality most definitely does not have to be terrible. The relationships you form over long distance have potential to be as strong as those you form in person, even if building them up is significantly more difficult.

cloche• 2 months ago

I'm the same as the parent. I've done this. I've been in groups for 2+ years and attend regularly and am not able to get any close friends out of it. I just don't form the connections that other people do. There's just something about the way I interact that doesn't cause me to get close to people. It might be something I'm doing subconsciously and I just don't know what it is. It's not like people can't stand me or anything. There's many people I can interact with normally at work or whatnot. I just don't seem to "click" with people. If anyone knows a coach or course that helps to address this, I would be interested.

arrowsmith• 2 months ago

29 isn't remotely close to too late, dude.

latexr5• 2 months ago

There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.

Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.

Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRG-YubP1rw

amon_spek• 2 months ago

Volunteering to help the vulnerable (in person) helped me with the vacuous superiority. I met some amazing people who just had bad luck. Your post shows you're on the right track and might be ready to make the next step.

vovavili• 2 months ago

That is the saddest thing I have read on this website.

lowercased• 2 months ago

Perhaps the name "ZpJuUuNaQ5" makes it harder for people to be able to do casual chit chat and introduce you to their friends?

eddieroger• 2 months ago

Hey, Z, how's it going?

People have had "weird" or out of the norm nicknames forever. Where do you think nicknames come from?

latexr5• 2 months ago

I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that’s not their real name. But if it is, it would make it easier to strike up conversations. “What an unusual name. How do you pronounce it, again? How’s that spelled? What’s the story behind it?”

sureMan6• 2 months ago

You have to find people you value, then it'll feel worth it

norome• 2 months ago

You said it yourself, you never developed the skills. there's a learning curve, but learnable skills they are. You need the courage to start developing a skill that you're completely incompetent in, and just do one thing each day. I was in the same place as you at 32 but four years later It's another story.

astura3• 2 months ago

How?

thisisauserid• 2 months ago

Taking a look at your past comments, I agree with you about you curating "vacuous superiority."

That kind of self insight is valuable.

So maybe, ya know, stop pretending on the internet that you have things figured out?

throwfish30003• 2 months ago

I know it seems stupid, but hit the gym. People will want to be around you if you have muscles.

latexr5• 2 months ago

People will want to be around you if you’re kind and generally pleasant, which is a much stronger reason to hang out with someone and leads to much longer lasting and healthier bonds than a physical trait. It also costs nothing and once you can get into that mindset, takes no effort.

rhines3• 2 months ago

There's some truth to this, and I'm sorry it's been your experience, but I'd like to gently expand on this a bit as I don't think muscles are the only thing that matter - I know plenty of skinny and fat people with friends.

Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When making new friends, proxies like attractiveness and social standing are how people judge if someone is likely to add value to their lives or not.

So yes, unfortunately, if you talk to someone and you're just some small quiet guy with no interesting characteristics, you'll probably be written off before you get a chance to develop a friendship with them. Whereas if they see you have muscles, or know you're successful in your career, or know you have other friends, they'll be more likely to assume you might be worth getting to know.

Things like working out, dressing well, learning to speak well, etc. all help. However, there is an alternative shortcut to building close friendships - forced interaction. When you're stuck sitting next to someone in class for a year, you don't have the privilege of swapping that person out for someone who seems cooler, you just have to get to know them. When you're stationed in the military with a squad you don't get to swap that squad out for people you think you might like more, you just bond with them. But there are few opportunities like that in normal life, you have to seek them out. Go on a 2 week long canoeing expedition, join a start-up incubator with a small team, play an MMO at a competitive level where you have scheduled runs and are in voice chat. Do stuff that forces you to interact with people for a long time and puts you in environments where you can't just leave and seek out people more like you.

bitexploder3• 2 months ago

Well. Start now. Treat it like an algorithm. Schedule reminders to text/email/call/follow up with people. My ADHD was hard. I would just forget about people and not because I don’t care about them. Then I would feel bad and delay even further because of that. Just do the thing. It may never feel natural except with very close and trusted people. That’s okay. Having friends for the sake of it isn’t the point. Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.

registeredcorn• 2 months ago

Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.

(Not OP, but interested to hear more)

In terms of motivation, do you know of a way to begin a sincere and genuine interest in others that doesn't have some ulterior motivations? That may sound kind of mechanical, but what I mean is roughly something like: "I don't know people, so I do not have any 'genuine interest' in them. As a result, any interest that I do have is insincere."

I chose not to have friends for several decades, which has been extremely convenient for the most part, except for tasks that require more than one person, or work-related situations. Not having to worry about offending people, remembering birthdays, messing up my own plans for the needs of others, etc. was very burdensome. However, being able to use people as a job reference, or getting leads on future opportunities from people I used to work with would also be beneficial so I can understand why people would expend the effort. However, retaining a friendship solely for those job-related purposes seems grossly manipulative because there is no sincerity in what I want from them. I do not want them I only want to extract what they can give to me.

Is it simply understood that, if you make friends with someone as an adult, it is inherently with ulterior motivations in mind, whether it be to avoid loneliness, get work-related benefits, or extract knowledge from them? As a child, I think people tended to make friends simply because they were bored and the person seemed neat. Is that why people still try to make friends with people?

chinathrow• 2 months ago

I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere

It's not too late, but it might need more effort than if earlier.

subtlejellyfish• 2 months ago

For what it's worth, it's never too late to keep in touch. You said you wish you'd kept in touch, if you're able, you should reach out. No one cares that its been awhile (and they're equally culpable), most people are happy and/or flattered you were thinking of them.

fullstop4• 2 months ago

You're only 29 -- I have good friends in my life that I didn't meet until I was in my 40s.

You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.

I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.

It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.

She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.

I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.

How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?

ge96• 2 months ago

Funny I go out a lot and I have so many random numbers in my phone from dudes who added me, single serving friends for the night

But yeah I only have like 5 real friends and then maybe 10 acquaintances eg. work

geodel• 2 months ago

Many will tell otherwise, but I think it is fine to not have these friends, contacts and acquaintances etc. In my case I did put in effort to stay in touch, call up people after many years. But in most cases result was like "Okay, we were in same school/office/rpoject/neighborhood / waited for same bus etc...etc.. now what do you want from me?"

It maybe that you most definitely want it. However for me "missing out" hasn't make life any worse.

jdw64• 2 months ago

Sounds good, let's be friends! Feel free to email me anytime, and I look forward to us staying in touch.

dan-bailey• 2 months ago

Dude, you can still recover some of those friendships. I went through a phase during college where I alienated a TON of my friends, and that was on me. For a variety of reasons we don't need to expound upon here. I eventually reached out to them, made my apologies, and would occasionally check in and see how they were doing. A few of those friendships are repaired and growing again. I think that there's a tendency toward second chance for people who've recognized their shortcomings, worked on them, and then taken responsibility for their actions.

dangsbrother• 2 months ago

Zero follow ups. The perfect bait.

me551ah• 2 months ago

As a hypothetical example, what happens if you could train a custom LLM with your own chats. And it responds to people, and gives the same response as you would. Would that be a form of mental cloning?

alexfoo• 2 months ago

The "Sasha" section brought back a load of memories from my childhood. As an Alex growing up in Western Europe with no connections to anything East it was just my Russophile father that used to call me Sandy or Sasha some of the time.

quijoteuniv• 2 months ago

I really though i was your friend… acquaintances… whatever man

TrackerFF• 2 months ago

One byproduct of me storing all my harddrives going back to 2001, is that I also have all my chat logs. Last fall I decided to invest in some HD adapter, as I was looking for pictures of my friend for his 40th birthday - miraculously all drives worked, though some would just power off at random intervals.

I decided to look through old IRC chats, and I honestly couldn't for sure say who maybe 30% of the people are just based on their nicknames. Nicknames I hadn't seen in 20 years. So I decided to feed all the raw chats into a LLM, and see if the model could string together names and nicknames. It managed to do surprisingly well! Many of the chats were not personal chats, but from the channels. My most active channels were local groups from my small town, so the names would naturally be named there, but I couldn't be bothered with sifting through the vast amounts of chats/text.

I then noticed that in the mid 2000s, MSN Messenger really took off, so most my chats were done there. Or ICQ if I were chatting with people from the US.

Then, around 2009/2010 Facebook became the standard (though it seems like my account was created in 2007), and most chats are via messenger.

valzevul5• 2 months ago

I wish I had kept my IRC logs but I am quite happy the ICQ logs are gone.

rootsudo2• 2 months ago

This is a great idea, I was leaning towards doing it with openrouter since the cost now is so affordable then codex but seeing someone else do it, can do it too with WhatsApp, iMessages, facebook, scattered irc logs

Also email sentiment too how fun

eamag• 2 months ago

Would not recommend to send your chats to some provider on openrouter. IMO one should only use local models for this sort of data

rootsudo2• 2 months ago

That makes sense, I was thinking of that specfically right after I wrote it too. No controls once sent.

It's a great excuse to buy an M5 Pro.

ifh-hn8• 2 months ago

Why do people keep chats? I have none, oldest is 6 months which is when I set my chat app to delete them. I'm the same with emails. Genuinely don't understand why you'd want to keep this stuff. I'd never go back and reread them.

salviati• 2 months ago

I'm not sure if it needs to be said, but one thing that is possible only if you keep your old chats is the analysis TFA made.

ifh-hn8• 2 months ago

That's a weird reason.

Thought process: I'm going to keep all my chats and in 20 years time run an analysis on them and write a blog post about it...

pingou3• 2 months ago

Why do you feel the need to delete your chats? Is it to save space? Would you still do it if you had unlimited storage?

olcay_• 2 months ago

I set my chats to be automatically deleted in 24 hours. This way when we have a small argument with someone, there's less chance of someone being triggered/angered by re-reading the chat. Although there have been rare cases where I had big arguments and would've liked to have the receipts.

ifh-hn8• 2 months ago

I wouldn't keep them in any context. I literally cannot see the point. Like I said I genuinely can't understand why you'd want to.

momento• 2 months ago

The author didn't keep the chats, the companies he interacts with did.

Armed with GDPR and data access laws, I got myself archives with all my messages, reactions, and social graphs.

ifh-hn8• 2 months ago

So a third party stored them for the OP. Same difference. I tend to delete all my stuff.

inanutshellus• 2 months ago

Did you keep your high school yearbooks?

ifh-hn8• 2 months ago

Hell no, I don't even think my school (British) did them. Nor would I turn up to a reunion. I'm not in contact with anyone I went to school with.

tokioyoyo• 2 months ago

My friends and I have 14+ year group chat, and we sometimes get drunk, scroll back, and make fun of ourselves. Worth every penny.

sowbug• 2 months ago

Might depend on how old you are. If you're in your 20s or 30s, you probably still remember the silliest details like a childhood friend's middle name. But after that, bright memories start to fade, and trust me, it only gets worse. That's when you realize that having a little bit of memory scaffolding like old email, chats, and calendar is helpful for once-easy questions like "where did we go camping that one time when I was 28 or 29?"

vagab0nd• 2 months ago

You will wish you had them when you need them. There might be reasons in the future that you don't realize now. Plus the fact that storage is cheap. So the most logical thing to do is to keep them unless you have a good reason to delete.

lgcmo• 2 months ago

Very cool analysis. There is already a selfhosted CRM for personal relationships - monicahq.com

PS: but please, just live your lifes

amythest14• 2 months ago

any chance of sharing the actual prompt you ended up using?

I analysed 20 years of my chats

Related Stories