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Comment by vageli | Hacker News Reader

This seems like such a strange addition. My use of signal is primarily group chat or as an SMS replacement. It is hard for me to see the benefit of adding stories like this to what to me is a tool for directly messaging specific individuals. I would be interested in hearing from people who think this is a good change.

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I can discreetly share text, images or videos with a subset of my contacts all at once without bothering them in a private conversation. They all appear in order and in full without some algorithmic trickery, they get flushed after a day or so and my friends can decide if they want to give them a look or not. It's a very nice feature especially for the kind of general stuff that I wouldn't want to personally send to people and clog our conversations.

Yes! I love stories. They are a subtle way to share cool stuff and avoid to be seen as annoying if you are the type of person that likes to share nice things ^^

Exactly, and those who want to reply, can do so directly, not filling up a long group chat with messages that are meant for just the original person.

It allows broadcasting to a group and people to opt in to watch and reply.

What’s stories? Any article they’ve published about it? Is it like the WhatsApp “Status” feature? Which is more like a 24 hr tweet if I can say so.

I share your indifference to the medium, but people out there do occasionally publish stories if such feature is available. If Signal makes it possible to say "you can keep publishing your stories too" when joining, and as a result more people move off WhatsApp (or, more generally, embrace the idea of platform independence), I can pinch my nose and enjoy the long-term side effect.

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