

Ask HN: Why did group chat never really take off? - chetan51

In the online world, instant messaging, email, video chat, and even Facebook walls have become popular mainstream mediums of communication. But why is it that the concept of group chat never took off?<p>If you are separated from your friends for a long time, you can keep in touch with each of them with any one of the various popular mediums of communication. But there's no way to feel the live company of a group of your friends online (IRC channels are not included because they involve mainly strangers).<p>People love talking to their friends one-on-one over instant messaging or video chat, but for some reason you don't see people talking live to more than one person online. Why is this the case? Is it a problem with the medium? If so, how can the medium be improved to fix this?
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pseudonym
I think we've gotten better at compartmentalizing our conversations. When IRC
and AOL chatrooms were big, the idea of online communication was fairly new.
Nowadays, most people can handle the concept of asynchronous chatting with
ease-- being able to follow multiple, non-real time (in the sense that you
aren't forced to listen to the person at that moment in time-- a chat line can
be read instantly, or when you're done with what you're doing) conversations
at the same time.

To that end, most people don't even think about having group chats. They
compartmentalize what they're doing into single units of required information,
and then go to each person they need that unit from individually. Let's say
you're having a party at Bob's place, Jill is bringing the food, and then
you're meeting at the movie theatre at 6 beforehand. It's almost an ingrained
reflex to converse with Bob in one chat window about cleaning up beforehand,
while talking with Jill in window 2 about how many peppers to use, all while
telling Alice and Eve to hold on while you hammer plans out in windows 3 and
4.

And the thing is, while this seems inefficient, from the side of who needs to
know what, it's actually simplified. Bob doesn't need to know what kind of
peppers are going to be in the food in order to take care of what he's doing.
Neither does Jill need to know the details of which cleaning crew is going to
be at Bob's before the party. And all Alice and Eve want to know is which
movie theatre it is and how late the party's going til. For the most part,
1-to-1 communication does what we need it to without being overwhelming (as
the chat window would end up being if we had Alice, Bob, Eve, and Jill with us
in the same IRC channel).

Which isn't to say there aren't situations wherein having groups of people are
useful. But those are generally defined as "meetings", and there's both
explicit and unsaid rules that usually pertain to such things-- there's a
point to the meeting, an agreement to not speak over each other, a meeting
leader that has a syllabus to follow. You're not going to have 3 separate
conversations going on where 2-3 people of the 10 at the table are talking
across the table to each other during the meeting. And any meeting that
doesn't have this sort of order imposed on it ends up being a waste of time,
because no information gets passed on and nothing gets resolved. All you end
up with is a mass of chaos wherein you have to tease bits of meaningful
conversation out in a process roughly equivalent to trying to get a pair of
headphones out of a ball of wire that's been sitting at the bottom of a desk
drawer for a couple years.

tl;dr: I don't think it's a software issue so much as it is a wetware issue--
meaningful unstructured communication gets exponentially more difficult when
more people are involved.

------
_delirium
It feels like it actually was common in the 90s, though maybe that's just
people I knew. But both techie and non-techie groups I knew in high school had
chatrooms that groups of friends would frequently visit and 'hang out' in---
AOL or IRC chatrooms, depending on the circle of friends. It does seem like
that sort of thing has gotten less common, though; not sure why.

I do still use IRC for that purpose (not just for large groups filled with
people I don't know irl), but admittedly it's mostly with more-technical
groups of friends these days. It doesn't seem that commonly using AOL-style
chatrooms to chat with rl friends is as common among 'normal' people as it was
in the AOL days.

------
hasenj
I think it's just because the technology for it sucks, and I think it's a
great idea for a startup -- you know, the idea of making it easy to just hang
out with a group of friends online.

I think the difficulty of setting it up is multiplied by the size of the
group: if it's difficult for 3 people to coordinate on installation and
configuration of the technology (software) then imagine how difficult it is
for a group of 7 people. Maybe the difficulty grows exponentially ..?

------
krakensden
It's awkwardly or not supported by the IM clients people use, that's why.

On another note, group chat is kind a crappy experience. It only takes 3
people talking for it to become impossible to follow, and the IRC idlers
culture is foreign and strange to people.

------
Mz
I believe group chat happens sometimes on a forum I have a membership with for
people who are deathly ill and/or have deathly ill family members. Such people
tend to have trouble getting out much and are willing to make the effort to do
a group chat. They aren't going anywhere anyway.

There are logistical problems with having an extended live online group
discussion, like bathroom breaks and the need to eat or drink (and the need to
signal people that you are going to the bathroom, something you don't have to
explicitly state in person when you get up and head for the loo). There are
reasons why IRL gatherings very often revolve around food or involve food:
It's the best way to keep people together for an extended period of time. If
there is no food, drink, or bathroom access, you have a pretty short time
frame before people will start leaving to go meet those needs. Some group
members have a much shorter chain in that regard (people with small kids in
tow, elderly people, people with serious medical conditions) and that means
that unless you have somehow established a core group of ridiculously hardy
individuals who can go for long periods without eating, drinking, or going to
the bathroom, your group isn't sustainable for long at all in the absence of
such amenities.

(Individuals who are that hardy are probably not much available for online
group chat. They are at the pub or out hiking up some mountain or traveling in
some foreign country without good internet access -- which is exactly where I
would be much of the time if I weren't medically handicapped.)

