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Comment by abhinai | Hacker News Reader

There was a time when everyone I knew was on Yahoo or MSN messenger. Then suddenly everyone stopped using messengers. The biggest problem with messengers was synchronous communication. Once someone started talking to you, you pretty much had to stay glued to the computer until the conversation ended. It was great for some conversations but a big inconvenience for the most part. Most people started hiding behind the invisible mode until there came a time when everyone was invisible and you didn't have anyone to talk to.

Next gen. communication tools like fb messenger, WhatsApp etc. solved this problem by making the default expectation asynchronous. It was a huge step in evolution of messaging.

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It feels like a regression. I don't really enjoy conversations with these tools. It's not as fun to converse with someone over the course of days when each message is some hours after the last. It is also not clear when people might want to talk. Synchronous IM was better because it was clear when people were available to talk, and when they were they would be attentive enough to have a real-time, fulfilling conversation. I haven't experienced that since MSN died.

Now everyone is always available on their phone, but also not truly available at any time. Presence indicators don't mean much any more because people may be online just to view Facebook, or on their phone only momentarily.

I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard that I believe it changes the nature and quality of conversations people have considerably, for the worse.

> It is also not clear when people might want to talk. Synchronous IM was better because it was clear when people were available to talk

That's why async is great, because people can answer whenever they like.

> when they were they would be attentive enough to have a real-time, fulfilling conversation

For this kind of conversation IM is not a good medium. In case of a real time, attentive convesation a phone call is much better, isn't it?

They can answer whenever they like, but when I choose to read their reply I will have lost some of my train of thought or maybe lost interest in the topic. It doesn't allow for the same quality, or at least type, of discourse in my experience.

>IM is not a good medium

It certainly was a good medium - I had lots of great conversations on old IM services and so did countless others. See this related thread from the other day [1]

You could talk to many people at the same time, unlike a phone call. You could more easily do it at the same time as your homework, watching a film, or doing something else on the internet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370281

You have to reinvent whole new protocols for those async conversations in the process, though, or misunderstandings or even outright failings in trust can ensue (as this article points out in a couple of examples.)

Any time you completely change a fundamental understanding of how something is done - especially something as critically foundational as communication - you end up having to build new rules quickly, or risk destroying either that foundation or trust in the new protocol.

> I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard that I believe it changes the nature and quality of conversations people have considerably, for the worse.

I am not so sure about that. I remember conversation from my 3310 and it was way shorter blip of words. I love word drawing, it speeds up my writing by a 5x factor (or 3x or 10x, don't know).

The thing is you never really know if the other party is up for long sentences because you can't tell if he's behind a computer keyboard or a phone (or god forbids, a tablet). It usually means "I am on the phone, talk to you later")

Yes, I think smartphone keyboards are obviously much better than a dumbphone, but worse than a PC keyboard. The problem is that now smartphone keyboards are used so much more frequently, in so many more situations. You can often tell when someone is typing from a phone in a IM message, an email, or a Hacker News comment.

> Yes, I think smartphone keyboards are obviously much better than a dumbphone

Really? I could imagine some (or maybe even most) people are faster on a smartphone, but for me it's "obviously" worse.

I'm tremendously slower on iOS/Android on-screen keyboards than I was with T9. I could text really fast using T9 on a hard keypad without even looking down at the screen, despite only really using it heavily for a year or two. Then I got a Blackberry Curve, a kind-of-but-not-really-smartphone with a full hard QWERTY keyboard -- there I was similarly fast.

Then came the iPhone and screen-only Android phones and I got much slower and less precise, and touch-typing is a total crapshoot. Despite having used them for almost 10 years now, I don't think I've ever recovered to anywhere near the speed I had with even a T9 keypad.

I think the key difference is a hard keyboard (or even 10 digit keypad). I'm not saying smartphones aren't enough of an improvement in other ways (obviously, since I've chosen them over dumbphones for a decade), but I really miss the haptic feedback of actual keys.

I wouldn't even say smartphone keyboards are strictly better than those of feature phones. Ones based on physical keyboards expecting fingers on the homerow aren't suited for one-handed use. Meanwhile dumbphones get tactile feedback on top of T9 (introduced to me in highschool by a girl who was upset by my "slow" replies prior).

It seems the parent has luck with word drawing, but I remember looking into alternative keyboards a couple years ago and not being impressed. The most enjoyable and fastest writing I've done on a mobile device is with 10-key Japanese input[0]. Unfortunately I do not regularly talk to anyone in Japanese.

[0]: Couldn't find a good article or webpage on this. You can hopefully grasp the core concept from http://miku.sega.jp/flick/en/. Since Japanese phonetics all end in -a, -e, -i, -o, -u with the exception of ん ~ n, the flick directions are symmetric. Coupled with how more than decent Japanese IME is and a few extra keys to navigate the suggestions, modifiers and other common input (brackets, commas, etc. operated by the same flick motions) you can get very fast and precise. I don't get to use it often, but it's a joy when I do. They even made a game out of it :)

> I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard

If I am at a place by myself then I just talk, using speech to text. Speech recognition is pretty good these days, I usually only have to fix small things in the resulting text (names, etc.), and it's much faster than typing a longer message.

> Presence indicators don't mean much any more because people may be online just to view Facebook, or on their phone only momentarily.

Presence indicators combined with status messages (e.g “walking the dog”) were the original inspiration behind Jack Dorsey’s conception of Twitter.

And behind WhatsApp. Messaging came later.

But there are red/green dots in the chat pop-up on facebook.

I believe mobility and the smartphone made it asynchronous because every knew you could be answering on your phone but not be with your phone in your hand all the time whereas old school messaging app expected you to be sat down in front of a computer and it usually meant you'd be available for some time.

Concerning invisibility I always thought it was a cool factor: "I am not here, don't need to be" combined with "I am not wasting time on messenger" and a lurking/stalking thing.

How so? The only thing that changed was like the article said. Back in the Yahoo/MSN messenger days, the only way that you could use the messenger was to be at your computer. With FB Messenger and WhatsApp, you are always available. You can turn notifications off, but that’s about it.

> Once someone started talking to you, you pretty much had to stay glued to the computer until the conversation ended.

Why? Were there no chat history in those tools?

Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation?

It was a social expectation rather than a technology thing. Sure, you could leave a conversation and restart it later. But that was similar to physically walking away from someone. Unless you're finished or really have to do something else, you usually don't walk away.

I had asynchronous chat conversations on AIM/Yahoo/MSN/GChat/etc. with dozens of people for over a decade; it was normal and expected for conversations to be as synchronous or asynchronous as either participant wanted.

Just to add another anecdote; I had the same experience as viraptor. It was expected that you said bye if you were leaving, and the ghosting equivalent was to be online but not reply to a message. I knew a few people that used it async but most were not like that.

A few people actually took it very personally when the common behaviour started to change. At some point an "internet etiquette" document started making rounds with "if I'm online it doesn't guarantee I'll respond immediately".

That was around the good old times when we argued whether utf-8 posts are acceptable, whether top-posters deserve life sentences, and other very important things...

Same experience here. Among my MSN friends it was also common to say "brb" to pause the conversation for a short amount of time. In contrast, I've never seen that in WhatsApp conversations.

Ah, yup! I had forgotten about that. Brb and afk. It did really feel like you were being ignored if the person wasn't responding. Also, having to let people know if you were going to be gone for an extended period of time, like a week or more. Summer camp! That was the worst. This girl I was online-dating went to camp for a few months and came back with a new boyfriend, lol.

It's still strange when you write to somebody and you see the person is online, but doesn't reply.

I guess turning off online status completely is the way to go. Maybe it should be off by default. What's the point of showing it if the person can answer anyway when he has the time?

The difference before is that people didn't have 24x7 connections, so if they were online it meant they were dialed up and sitting at their computer. Now 'online' means nothing as we're all always online.

Coming from IRC and ICQ and AIM and all that, most of my conversations were asynchronous in one sense.

But in another sense, they weren't, as I would often elect to set my status across my services as Away in order to curb the expectations of some people who were particularly in need of attention.

I guess that part hasn't changed, though. Just today I had to explicitly set boundaries with someone about how often they can realistically expect to command my attention away from my task at hand and toward my phone.

> Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation?

Sort of, but back then the expectations were different. It would have been uncommon, and sometimes impolite, to come back to a conversation several hours or minutes later as if there was no official end.

Feels weird now but having lived in the original chat room era, in which our parents' phone calls interrupted our internet connection, it was pretty different back then.

My memory is fuzzy but I don't recall any central server saving the messages- nothing could be sent to you if you were not online. Which, considering dialup hogged the phone line, was most of the day.

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