Group chats rule the world

&gt;Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse?<p>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&#x27;s an authentic experience.

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).<p>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.<p>The group became popular and the admin started creating several groups to accommodate more participants. It looked something like &quot;CTOs 1&quot;, &quot;CTOs 2&quot;, etc<p>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 &quot;Communities&quot; feature to create topic-oriented subgroups, but that&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s possible to keep the sales people away, or at least invite-only.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maggieappleton.com&#x2F;ai-dark-forest" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;maggieappleton.com&#x2F;ai-dark-forest</a><p>As AI takes over the public internet (the trees) the people will retreat to safe underground spaces where they know only authentic humans live.

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&#x27;s response? Absolutely nothing. No, it&#x27;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&#x27;m not sure why, but big techs in the US somehow couldn&#x27;t get Chinese market. Case in point, the emojis in all the chat apps, be it Apple&#x27;s or Meta&#x27;s or Google&#x27;s or whatever, are just ugly and not expressive, when compared to WeChat&#x27;s, let alone QQ&#x27;s. Of course, as a Chinese user I&#x27;m biased, but that&#x27;s the point: very few Chinese natives like the emojis offered by western countries (and I guess vice versa).<p>And then, well, there&#x27;s no &quot;and then&quot;. 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.

&gt; 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.<p>There are more like 2^n - 1 subgroups, i.e. as many subgroups as the there can be. If you think you&#x27;re safe because you&#x27;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.

Why the recent shift?<p>1) Everything being in public was the aberration. Purely a post-Facebook thing.<p>2) … and also it was never really true, dig past the surface for almost any interest and you’ll find private forums, private <i>sections</i> 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?

I have learned to avoid group chats. I don&#x27;t mind actual in person groups, but either group chats I&#x27;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&#x27;s okay, it isn&#x27;t for me.<p>Chat works for a lot of things but I&#x27;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.<p>Voice chat is probably better but since that usually precludes being part of a text chat in the first place, I haven&#x27;t had a chance to try.

I&#x27;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!<p>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&#x27;m just in a different phase of my life where de-emphasizing them comes naturally. It&#x27;s hard for me to disentangle whether it&#x27;s me or the Internet that&#x27;s changed, but from the positive reaction here and in group chats to this article: I feel safe assuming I&#x27;m at least not alone.

On shared rituals, the ones I like the most are<p>1. Good mornings. Where it&#x27;s a norm to post &quot;Good morning&quot; or equivalent at the start of your day. It signals that you&#x27;re continuing to participate and value the group.<p>2. @Welcomes. When a new member joins, they are @-ed with a welcome message by the users currently present. It helps expand the join-&gt;engage funnel. Some groups have a lot of people show up and then never participate.<p>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.<p>In my experience, it&#x27;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&#x27;s the right ritual for the group.

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.

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.<p>I noticed that Discord is usually the platform of choice but I can see some using other platforms, the platform doesn&#x27;t really matter much, and it&#x27;s nice to know you can always drop by to ask questions. But for some reason when it&#x27;s Discord I imagine it&#x27;s only kids on the other side, for better or worse.<p>&quot;I love inside jokes. I hope to be a part of one someday&quot;<p>-- Michael Scott

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

&gt; 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.<p>This is directly at odds with the aforementioned moderation. The slack that I&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>There are private channels there for specific invite-only groups, but they&#x27;re still focused on a specific topic rather than excluding that one terrible person.<p>The existence of an N-1 chat is a signal that the group can&#x27;t do the hard thing and actually talk to that one person.

Reading this as my iMessage group chat has gone haywire. I&#x27;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.

I wonder how Slack&#x2F;Discord channels change this.<p>In several of ones I&#x27;m in, we have a dedicated channel for topics that are best treaded lightly about - one is called &quot;adult chat&quot;, another one is called &quot;taboo&quot;. The understanding is that if you cannot participate in a civil manner, you leave the channel, for awhile.<p>I&#x27;ve had to leave those channels on occasion. The chat, and I, were better for it.<p>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!

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.

This is an interesting avenue to add to my search of “where the experts hang out”. I tried to reflect on it here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;josh8.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mailing_lists.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;josh8.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;mailing_lists.html</a> (As you can infer from the title, I decided that ‘mailing lists’ is one good answer).<p>I also had a brief discussion about the subject with an older person I respect, and this is what he had to say:<p>&gt; Interesting post. I think you&#x27;ve hit on the central issue: where are the experts? &gt; &gt; Back in the day, USENET was kind of the hotspot for that kind of thing; these days, it&#x27;s mostly cranks and luddites; a few folks are still around, but it&#x27;s just not what it once was. &gt; &gt;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&#x27;re mostly retired and have handed the torch off to the next batch. So where are THOSE people? &gt; &gt; 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&#x27;s mostly point-to-point. :-(

Nice observations.<p>In my experience, the most important aspect is whether people care about other people&#x27;s take. At a minimum, care enough to maintain a respected persona, but mainly, to be interested in hearing and adopting or shaping others&#x27; approaches. It&#x27;s the collective production of a refined collective understanding.<p>If the motivation instead is malice or one-upsmanship or networking or shaping product reputations, the dynamic is less interesting.<p>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.<p>My main application for AI would be analyzing&#x2F;evaluating discourse to automate or facilitate governance. If it could work regardless of incentives, then there&#x27;s be less need for exclusivity, and discourse would scale much better.

If I was in any groups like this I&#x27;d mute them or leave. Even reading this guy&#x27;s blog makes me exhausted.<p>Introverts, unite! And then quietly look at their shoes awkwardly.

&gt; Salons and groups have always existed but why the recent shift to private discourse?<p>...what?<p>There is nothing recent about this and there hasn&#x27;t been any shift. I&#x27;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&#x2F;green segregation fiasco and many, many more.<p>&gt; Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work?<p>High SNR, shared social norms.

Contractors (tradespeople) love WhatsApp group chats in the UK. Instant gossiping (...libel) and blacklisting if a customer doesn&#x27;t worship the ground you walk on.

Private chats solve the problem of anonymity allowing people to behave badly. In a chat you have reputation and you get kicked if you&#x27;re an asshole.

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

&gt;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.<p>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.

I&#x27;ve been building a product to bring my Slack conversations to a new social platform [0] but I haven&#x27;t figured out how to get the same meaningful and deep conversations about tech that happen in private chats.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=tVTc9ibiSkM</a>

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

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

Feels like high school all over again where I wasn&#x27;t allowed to sit at the &quot;cool table&quot;.

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

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&gt; AI trends started in group chats<p>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

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.

Once again an SV investor congratulates themselves on figuring out something that any teenager could&#x27;ve told you

It&#x27;s so sad though. Chats are very ephemeral.

This reads like an elaborate invitation for Ethereum-guy to join author&#x27;s group chat. And also Erik Torenberg, whoever that is.

Probably falling back to age old IRC might be an option.<p>AI Might be implemented there as well in future, but not so quick, may be!

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

&gt; the great culture wars of 2020.<p>Well that&#x27;s the dumbest thing I have ever heard.

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

It could be cool to have an HN Telegram group

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

This is a very real take on where memes &#x27;start&#x27; nowadays in the valley.

is there anything that VCs will _not_ pontificate on?

true

must be nice.. :(