
Group Chats Are Making the Internet Fun Again - commons-tragedy
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/05/group-chats-are-making-the-internet-fun-again.html
======
alexgmcm
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own
client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.

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

~~~
Crinus
I remember IRC in the late 90s, early 2000s having A LOT (like 9 out of 10) of
people who otherwise had no idea about computers (remember droves of people
disconnecting after 'Press Alt+F4 to get @'?). People who didn't knew the
difference between a file and a directory (or folder) were on IRC with
channels having hundreds of people.

If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from
intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they
can figure out IRC.

The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved
off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is
mainly a social thing.

~~~
wlesieutre
Lack of conversation persistence is a real problem. It's 2019 and people
expect to have it. If messages disappear into the ether while I'm not actively
connected to the room, it's not going to work for participating in a group
conversation.

Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your
client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't
online, but it's not reasonable to expect an average computer user even have
an always-connected machine to run it on, let alone actually get a relay
working.

If they can use Facebook they could use IRCCloud, but that's $5/month and
Messenger/WhatsApp/Discord/Slack are free.

~~~
nixpulvis
Well that's the whole idea behind Snapchat, but I get your point.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.

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

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

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

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

~~~
ggg2
almost every single irc server since 94 or so have some sort of logger. if
not, it's an intentional design choice for that one community.

~~~
hombre_fatal
You're suggesting people scour logs for missed messages as if that's seriously
your pitch for "IRC has that, too."

This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and
they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's
the _users_ who are idiots."

~~~
lapinot
Maybe september is starting to end?

------
iamben
This rings very true. I'm down using Facebook/Twitter for work, or checking
every 2 or 3 days if I'm bored, desperate or looking for something in
particular. Instagram is about a 50% mix of pretty things and friends, but the
pretty things post way more often, so the split is heavily in that direction.

I'd say approximately a third of the friends I chat to regularly (late 30s
ish) have left or don't use Facebook - but we're all in lots of WhatsApp
groups. A couple with big groups of friends, but lots that are started before
a night/day when the few in the group got together and just stay open to
extend the fun from the day with relevant stuff.

It feels a lot more private to post to these. You can share things without
some random friend commenting, or judging because you know exactly who you're
sharing with. It feels more like having a pint with a couple of mates than
pinning something to a noticeboard that friends, relatives and work colleagues
may (or may not, depending on whether FB deems it worthy) seeing.

WhatsApp has definitely replaced Facebook for a few of us - and bearing in
mind they have the same overlord, it seems like a pretty canny buy now.

~~~
jjoonathan
Suddenly google circles don't seem so silly after all.

~~~
kristianc
The basic idea of Google Circles - that we have small circles that we share
content and engage with, was basically sound.

Google+'s misstep was to overlay a clumsy UI and load a lot of the work of
setting up and maintaining those circles on the user. Neither do a lot of
users have the clean line between "Close Friend", "Friend" and "Acquaintance"
clear in their head.

------
Udo
Discord is eating the (chat) world, in the same way that Facebook has eaten
social blogging, and Google has eaten email.

I'm running a small site where people can play pen&paper-style roleplaying
games together in small groups, featuring persistent channels and a wiki for
each channel, in addition to the core dice rolling and chat functions
([https://rolz.org](https://rolz.org) for anyone who's curious). The site has
survived the stunningly well-funded and abundantly feature-rich Roll20.net,
because it's non-commercial and doesn't require user accounts. However, since
Discord appeared on the scene, traffic has been declining massively and
steadily.

Where we once had hundreds of groups online at a given time, it's now usually
in the low 20s. At first, people kept asking for a Discord-bot version, and at
least one user made one using the public API, and now Discord is pretty much
the only game in town.

Meanwhile IRC is also pretty much dead, as many people have noticed in this
thread. I still hang out in the #ludumdare IRC channel, but over the last two
years that community has dwindled from hundreds of users during the Compo to
maybe ten, and from dozens of users during the rest of the time to maybe 2 or
3 being online per day. While the LD Discord has replaced the IRC channel, it
is also a lot less vibrant and social. It's now more a loose collection of
mildly disinterested people who sometimes hang out in the same chat room,
mostly unconcerned with each other. I wonder how symptomatic that is.

~~~
gylterud
Just dropping by to say thank you for running rolz! My role-playing group use
the site for dice rolling every week. We have been doing so for more than a
year now, and it has been great.

------
ggggtez
>For me, at least, group chats aren’t the new AIM. They’re the new Facebook.
[...] Facebook was a place for this kind of purposeless sociality before it
was a place for repeatedly blocking and reporting your step-cousin.

I'm glad to see this article articulate this. If you were thinking about
something political, say Climate Change, and posted that, then you'd suddenly
find yourself arguing basic facts with someone who dropped out of your
highschool that you never got around to defriending.

Repeat post-argue-block until you can't muster the energy, and start posting
trivial nothing like pictures of what food you are eating like everyone else -
wanting social interaction but repeatedly slapped like a pavlovian dog until
you don't know if it's even possible to have a real conversation online
anymore.

------
kalado
I had that thought for months. I'll give you my business Idea for free for the
next big social network, since I'd rather work on my game development:

Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just
search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad
once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You
can upvote messages and once they reach a threshold they will be broadcasted
to all channels. Broadcasted messages can be saved in an archive and reread
later by everyone.

Monitization can be done by allowing people to pay for broadcasts.

Everyone can start their own chatroom of course but names are unique.

Please, someone do it, I want this. Discord is to cumbersome because you need
to find an interesting server first and you have to commit to much.

~~~
ve55
A large issue I see with this is that of moderation. Discord, Slack, Reddit,
and so on, all have appointed moderators for every community that keep users
in-check according to community standards. With this idea, there are no
'owners' of any of these chatrooms, so are you going to moderate it centrally?
That is a lot of work and requires a lot of people, just think about how much
work it is to moderate a single twitch chatroom for spam, let alone an
unlimited amount of them.

Would love to hear if you have any ideas on solving that. Besides that, I like
the idea.

~~~
kalado
Yeah, that is a big problem. The only thing I can think of is to allow vote-
kicks/bans. Account creation can only happen with mobile numbers to discourage
spam and other violations and people just creating another account with a new
mail.

You could also use this as an opportunity for another monetization system
which allows people to pay for a reserved channel and moderation rights. The
owners would be incentivized to behave in a reasonable manner because people
could just move to an umoderated channel if they don't like the
administration.

I see the chats in a semi persistent state between reddit/discord and
kik/jodel etc.

Not persistent over weeks or months but also not as short lived as a one day
discussion that gets lost in new posts.

------
fullshark
It turns out being connected with good friends/family is a lot more enjoyable
than being connected with every random person you had a university course with
once.

Facebook is going to be your rolodex (A "facebook" even! good name for it) and
then there's going to be a heavily segmented private social network for your
friends / families to connect and share photos. Figuring out how to make that
happen with limited / minor work for the user is the challenge.

~~~
messo
I set up my personal rolodex as an alternative to Facebook. It's called
Monica, and can be self-hosted:
[https://www.monicahq.com/](https://www.monicahq.com/)

~~~
zrobotics
From your TOS: "You must only use the site to do things that are widely
accepted as morally good." [0]

I'm sorry, but WTF does this even mean? That's so incredibly vague that I tend
to read it as "essentially, nearly anything could be a TOS violation". For
instance, if I log a call with "He was in a bitchy mood and was being an
asshole", that is a TOS violation, since calling someone an asshole is widely
considered unkind.

[0] [https://www.monicahq.com/terms](https://www.monicahq.com/terms)

~~~
TeMPOraL
I don't think surface kindness done or not done privately qualifies as a moral
concern.

------
saagarjha
Group chats are great, but they still have a bunch of problems that their
predecessors didn't: they're walled and often not private. In certain cases,
using your own client is anathema and an opportunity to be kicked off the
platform :/

~~~
tty2300
For tech groups there are a lot of good ones on matrix which is a federated
network.

~~~
MayeulC
I second this. Matrix is a great protocol, with lots of promising clients [0]
like Fractal, Spectral, Riot(X), Pattle, etc. and bridges pretty well with
Slack, Discord, Gitter, IRC...

It is self-hostable, and provides a modern baseline of features (though Riot
is the only fully-featured client at the moment).

Burying myself in a walled garden is a no-go, so it has been working pretty
well for me so far. I only regret the fact that the reference server
implementation consumes a lot of resources, but it should be coming down
[1][2] (the current state stems from the proof-of-concept python
implementation having grown unchecked over the years), with alternative
implementations hopefully becoming viable soon[3].

[0]: [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-
matrix](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/clients-matrix)

[1]: [https://github.com/orgs/matrix-
org/projects/9](https://github.com/orgs/matrix-org/projects/9)

[2]: [https://matrix.org/blog/posts](https://matrix.org/blog/posts)

[3]: [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-
now.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/try-matrix-now.html)

~~~
no_identd
Meh. Personally, I could neither consider myself a Matrix fan…:

[https://https://web.archive.org/web/20180711050333/https://m...](https://https://web.archive.org/web/20180711050333/https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html#what-
is-the-difference-between-matrix-and-psyc) (Why they removed this, and many of
the other entries, from their FAQ? Who knows.)

[https://about.psyc.eu/Matrix](https://about.psyc.eu/Matrix)

[https://secushare.org/comparison](https://secushare.org/comparison)

…nor a fan of Federation in general:

[https://about.psyc.eu/Federation](https://about.psyc.eu/Federation)

[https://secushare.org/federation](https://secushare.org/federation)

Of course, the perceived need for federation only arises in the first place
because the 'Inter'net doesn't actually deserve the name "Internet"—it's just
three bead on a string telco networks in a Trenchcoat held together by
thought-terminating clichés, of which you'll find plenty over here (and I
don't exclude my comment there from that description):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19864808)

And a beads on a string model kinda forces one to enduldge otherwise mostly
unnecessary middlemen.

Grrrrrrrr.

------
wetpaws
Discord is the best thing that happened to me since IRC and I could not be
happier. We exchange art, we discuss movies, we play DND together. Obviously
it could not replace IRL connections, but it complements them nicely.

~~~
kzzzznot
I’ve very recently signed up to discord. Are you able to recommend any high
quality tech discord servers/of the same calibre as HN? Im also interested in
video games playing/development

~~~
blakewatson
Oooh, I too would like to see a curated list of tech Discord servers.

------
donatj
When I hit my early 30s a few years ago all my friends moved away and had
kids. Getting them together even in a virtual form to do anything in a
synchronous way has become basically impossible - it leaves me longing for the
days of AIM and IRC when it was very easy to make friends online.

I haven’t had a decent conversation with a stranger in years.

~~~
ulisesrmzroche
Ever been to a bar?

~~~
DanTheManPR
Serious question: how do you meet people at a bar? It has never been clear to
me how that actually works.

~~~
ahelwer
People who go to bars alone are usually open to conversation. So you go to the
bar and sit at the bar with open seats next to you. Whenever someone sits near
you, you strike up conversation. It is wise here to have a keen sense of
whether or not people are interested in continuing your conversation. Choose a
bar with a relaxed, quiet atmosphere, probably serving tasty drinks so you
have a shared activity over which to bond with people.

------
m-i-l
The article doesn't cover this, but how do people discover these group chats?
All the Discord servers I've joined I've essentially found by word-of-mouth,
which doesn't seem very high tech. In the old days you'd find the interesting
online forums by "surfing the web".

~~~
egypturnash
I feel there is an argument that this is one of the reasons people are
gravitating to private chats. They’re invitation only. You’re not running the
risk of your offhand snark about something with political ramifications
getting besieged by bots and drones the way you are on Twitter.

You have to be someone who people _want_ to connect with. And if you stop
being that kind of person you run the risk of getting kicked out.

~~~
CM30
Also not at risk of it becoming an online controversy with articles in the
media and the potential of your employer firing you to save their own
reputation.

Sites like Reddit, Facebook and especially Twitter have a bad reputation for
taking people who said something slightly controversial and making them online
pariahs.

These more private systems are safe from both drama fanatics and people
looking for controversies, and from journalists looking for controversial
communities to infiltrate and profile.

------
baxtr
The most fun I have with my smartphone are two iMessage group chats with
different friend circles. Hilarious. I just hope no one will ever analyze
those...

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

~~~
chapium
Whatsapp is similar in my experience, at least for chat.

Push to talk/listen is popular in china as well and its insanely irritating
being around people shouting at their phones to reply.

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

------
jslabovitz
I'll probably regret stirring the pot here, but I've never understood or been
comfortable with group chats. I grew up in the era of Usenet groups and email
(and later, forums & blogs), where conversations were slow and threaded. In
the rare event I happen into a group chat today (whether IRC, Discord, SMS,
FB, etc.), it feels incredibly stressful and overwhelming.

Sometimes I think of Vernor Vinge's book _True Names,_ where one of the
characters is called the Mailman, and only deals with the world through email.
That might be me by now...

------
bcaa7f3a8bbc
Two years ago, I've became disillusioned about the current status of web
communities and culture. Basically I was thinking that, the web culture, once
hailed as the center of out-of-box thinking, creativity, weird subcultures,
e.g. Something Awful and early 4chan, was dying. Of course it has the good,
the bad and the ugly, but now it seems increasingly boring.

For example, text boards and forums? Mostly dead. Imageboards? Even small
sites dedicated to a particular obscure subculture are dying, the biggest ones
are mostly ideological nonsense. Blogs? It no longer has a visible and
influential blogosphere. Reddit? Primarily newsfeed and links. Also, lots of
communities I was interested in was going downhill. Twitter? Lots of
interesting things was happening in the beginning, but nowadays it's a
mainstream walled garden, etc.

Even Hacker News had:

* I Don’t Know How to Waste Time on the Internet Anymore

[http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-
waste-...](http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/i-dont-know-how-to-waste-time-
on-the-internet-anymore.html)

So I asked a friend online. He was once active in a technical community and
specialized in writing tropes and jokes, but already stopped posting for a
while.

I asked: _What are you doing nowadays?_

He answered: _Busy works._

Then I told him my all of my perceptions I mentioned, and asked him: what the
heck is going on for web communities? what is the future? what are the places
where interesting things are produced nowadays?

He answered: _I think it has returned back to the era of chatrooms._

I've realized his judgement cannot be too correct after seeing this article on
HN.

Pretty much. I've heard a lot of activities is now happening on Discord
servers, especially for gaming, it's almost the role IRC played in the early
2000s. Telegram also has many interesting groups and those dramas and
incidents are coming on a weekly basis! I believe the chatroom would be a
breeding group for the next wave of web communities.

In short, I guess we've just completed _a full circle_.

Unfortunately, what it means to me is:

(1) All the legacy of the previous web communities needs to be thrown away.

(2) It may take years for the new communities to recreate some interesting
aspects of the old web communities had, and by the time you've rediscovered
it, it would be too late.

(3) Most protocols and services and proprietary. Now a even bigger walled-
garden is coming.

(4) I cannot be happy enough to see that Hacker News is still going strong.
Registering an account was a correct decision. I think Hacker News is largely
playing a role of the Usenet newsgroups, but in disguise as a news website. It
may not be as effective as forums, but is working pretty well.

------
vgchh
After being connected through WhatsApp with a number of groups of family and
friends, I recently decided to disconnect. I am on WhatsApp, but I no longer
participate in group chats. I took this step after I felt that my time was no
longer mine. I mostly played along for the FOMO. I still do 1:1 chats as and
when needed.

After this change I feel liberated. I am able to think more independently,
avoid group think and have more meaningful 1:1 conversations. For now I am
planning to stick to this change.

------
taiwanboy
My problem with slack or discord is that once you join a group, there are just
too many channels and sub channels to follow.

~~~
JimiofEden
For Discord, I tend to mute all but the most relevant ones. This usually ends
up being the general channel or the one or two channels that I actually cared
about and why I joined in the first place.

I tend to treat channels as faster paced forums, more or less.

------
00deadbeef
We had group chats in IRC, MSN, AIM, ICQ, etc. What's new?

~~~
brootstrap
My take: what is new? People want to own an $800 phone that can browse the
web, do group chat, run apps etc. I get a kick out of modern ads, although
they are probably effective (just not on me).

"Buy this $800 iphone 10x-r so you can send animated images to your grandma &
grandpa. Or run an app that puts an smiley imoge over your face"

I understand for some people this is a great feature. Or how about being able
to 'unlock your phone' with your face. Great that is totally cool (not), but
sure go ahead and drop a grand on the new iphone if you want to.

I dont really agree with the article. Technically these group chats might be
sending info over the wire. But normally i wouldnt really associate a group
chat with "the internet".

------
rosege
Im surprised no one has mentioned Kix here - Its probably one of the apps
closer to the old days of IRC that I have played around with in quite some
time.

------
bluedino
Any thoughts on why StackOverflow chat never really took off?

~~~
ProAm
Id say its largely due to the culture found on SO.

