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Comment by shpx | Hacker News Reader

This is how chat apps should work or have the option of working. Why make you look at an animated “…” until I’m satisfied with my message when you could be watching me write it instead? It’s closer to how conversation works and we have the bandwidth and the latency.

It’s immoral because you’re lying by hiding that this is happening and not making it go both ways, so why not show users and just make it part of the UI?

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You're reading other peoples unfinished thoughts before they've said them?!

Wouldn't that be closer to a real spoken conversation?

As long as you're told what the behaviour is, I don't see a problem. I think for short lived chats such as those support chats it would speed up things.

Yeah. The problem here is that they do it without letting you know.

Google Wave did this (and with nest threads)! I never tried it for serious conversations, but it was quite fun to write at the same time as 1-3 other people and see them amend their messages in real time.

I work outside of tech, and so many of my inter-work communications would be so much better on Google Wave. Of course, certain types of staff-wide communications would be solved better by anything other than email, whether that be Slack or a different platform, but I will always resent the death of Wave for what we missed out on as a society.

Agreed. I like the behavior of traditional unix talk, which worked like that.

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