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Comment by itisit | Hacker News Reader

Presence awareness is an insidious overreach IMO. Warms my heart to see petty rebelliousness automated in this way. I'd also like to see something that edits the same Slack message ad nauseam with banal remarks.

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Yeah, I've realized nothing good ever comes from knowing when someone else is typing. As this rather extreme example illustrates.

Pidgin has a feature that notifies you when someone starts typing at you or goes from "Away" to "Online". Kind of weirds people out when you message them just before they message you, or you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.

> Kind of weirds people out when … you message them the instant they sit down at their PC.

I miss the AIM days when you’d hear the “door opening” sound when someone signed on. It was totally normal to immediately ping someone then because signing onto AIM was asking to be pinged. And that sound made your heart skip a beat because it might be the girl you like and she might even IM you first :o

MSN user here. Feigning a sign in and out was a good way to start a conversation with someone without looking like you wanted to talk to them first. i.e. crush, gf, friend you're not so close with.

I dunno, I find the typing notification useful in group discussions so I know that coworker A is about to say something (and I know that she's going to make the exact same point I was going to make).

I find active/non-active presence helpful so I know whether or not to expect a reply soon.

I prefer to communicate asynchronously via text to keep myself and others focused on work. People become surprisiginly resourceful when they no longer expect or rely on realtime (or near to it) replies. To each their own, of course.

That's what makes Slack presence so useful, I pause my notifications when I don't want to be interrupted -- others can see that in my presence (but if they really need me, they can choose to notify me anyway). So I can stay heads-down and work, but if something important happens, I'm still reachable. And at least in my company, people don't abuse do not disturb.

Plus, I never need to wonder if it's safe to send a message to a coworker for their timezone "George is in Germany, am I going to wake him up if I send me a message now?" I can rely on him setting notifications appropriately.

I added a loading indicator emoji that I use if I want to respond to something but it's going to take a bit.

I've been talking to friends every day, for what amounts to decades now, over chat tools that don't show when anyone is typing. In contrast to e.g. the tools at work that do, I feel like the interactions we have not only don't suffer from not seeing who is typing, but generally feel "easier" to me. There is no "oh I was about to type but now you're typing so I'll stop typing", or "I started typing but on second thought I don't have anything to add right now (or maybe I was interrupted) and now you're waiting for me", or any of that tired stuff.

Why? You can easily tell if someone is paying attention if they are talking in person. This seems really selfish to me, I personally find it one of the best modern chat features. Then again, I grew up with it and have learned to be zen about several minutes of typing... followed by "k"

> You can easily tell if someone is paying attention if they are talking in person. This seems really selfish to me

Privacy and concentration are selfish interests? Why not have a 9-5 webcam of yourself feeding into my surveillance dashboard? This way I can see my team hard at work as I would in an open office. They'll love that.

The prior in-person work setup is not the ideal nor the standard. I don't need or expect others to pay attention to what I'm saying right when I'm saying it unless there's real urgency. We're all IP-enabled meat functions now; there's no going back.

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