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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

i'll take it one further and say that having a messenger app that shows "online" or "active" status is not something I like. In addition to the problems with having an app that sends an indicator to the other party that somebody is actively typing.

I like how Signal just shows that the person exists as a contact. Whether they're awake or not, or active, or idle is opaque to me and I'm totally fine with that.

One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead.

In things like facebook messenger I bet that 99% of users never dig into the settings to turn OFF the "show your activity status to other people" option.

For something like a work place communication tools such as Slack I can understand the purpose of setting yourself active or idle manually to indicate whether you're available for messages, or in a different time zone, or whatever. That's a different use case.

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I remember IRC a bit differently - mostly with it being tied to dialup. When we were on irc, we were on. We might be "afk" for a bit, but generally would be back soon. If you saw someone's nick on irc, it was very likely that they were online and active. Even with ICQ and AOL, it was pretty apparent if people were online or not. If they weren't online, or you didn't need a quick response you sent them an email.

As DSL and broadband became more popular, chat moved to being more asynchronous. Chat clients started synchronizing message history with the server to make it avaialble on all your devices. It was easier to leave your presence online, even when you were unreachable.

IRC itself still retains a lot of that realtime chat, mainly because of its transient nature. Yes - the channel might be populated with people that aren't actually there, but the conversation is much more real time. Unless you have a bouncer or web client, the chat history starts when you join the channel and ends when you leave. There's no threading (ok, maybe some of the web-based clients will do that), so even if you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't participate in it. At best you can start a new conversation referencing the old one. Not everyone in the channel will have that history.

I consider that lack of permanence a feature. When Google Talk came out, I loved the fact that all my chat history was saved and it was available everywhere. Now that all chat clients have that, I find myself preferring the more ephemeral/transient chats.

I wholeheartedly agree here. In addition, IRC seemed more like a reflection of real life given the "synchronous design". Such as:

> so even if you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't participate in it.

Mirrored the limitations one would have in-person (i.e., they might have heard about the conversation, but now cannot participate in it, notably because it already occurred and all the same people may not be available -- you would have to start anew!)

Another interesting component of IRC is the explicit nature of people joining a channel -- it was treated the same way someone walked into a physical room; People would greet them and numerous conversations would naturally begin just by the essence of that presence. This is all mostly lost in modern clients.

I'm not sure why it's relevant to mirror life before always-on internet? It's not like I refuse to read books because my distant ancestors would sit around the fire and talk instead of reading.

Though I understand (but do not share) your desire for truly real-time, ephemeral conversation and IRC is one of the last remaining experiences with that ephemerality.

For the simple reason that humanity has evolved over thousands of years to consume and spread knowledge via the same tried-and-true methods.

They're commonplace online because they work.

When in 20 years, humans are literally beaming terabytes of data straight into their brains every hour, I'll still occasionally enjoy some "slow", yet rich in nuance, communications.

Have they? I mean humans spent most of their anthropological existence doing none of the sort. Moreover norms over how people conversed, when they conversed, and how openly they conversed widely varied based on culture, social standing, and gender. In many societies women weren't allowed to talk to many other people.

It's fine to prefer the ephemeral communication of IRC I'm just not sure if appealing to history is a good justification.

In my experience, for communication with people (including myself) using dialup or intermittently connected in some other way, the on-/offline indicator on ICQ was a killer feature, an indication of availability and responsiveness that required no effort to maintain, and I have not seen it usefully reproduced in the always-connected broadband world. Of course, various third-party clients providing “stealth mode” were abundant, so it’s not like this mode delivered everything people wanted out of the box, either. (It might be that the actual important difference was that you used ICQ for casual conversation only, and adding an acquaintance to your contact list was not a given or socially expected; not an implementation or UI issue as such.)

from the POV of people using irc from dialup it was indeed very much like that - but also from those who were dialing up to unix systems, or using them locally over a network such as at a university, the machine running the irc client maintained a persistent network connection so it was possible to run a persistent client (or eggdrop bot) without disconnecting/reconnecting and re-entering channels.

after about the year 2000 or so it was also really common to see people with shell accounts various places using gnu screen to maintain a persistent irc client session.

When I think about IRC, I remember everyone and their mom had a bouncer.

IRC fans will rewrite history to frame every flaw in the protocol as a feature.

As I understand it, all of these features are not features that people really like, they are features that 'drive engagement' in that horrible UX A/B testing sort of way. The basic tenet is that if you can increase the anxiety of the user they will spend more time checking the app. If I am messaging someone and see some blinking dots, I will stay in the app until they message back. Otherwise I might use the messaging app as an asynchronous tool and not waste all of my time in it.

It's not just the apps doing it. I've seen people pressuring others to respond immediately to everything and I've seen that expectation causing very clear anxiety. It's way too much pressure on top of every other day to day demand.

I can see how apps have been designed to promote that kind of behavior, but how did they end up getting us to demand it from each other? I missed the memo.

I've decided that if failing to obsessively check your phone and taking longer than a few minutes to respond to texts, social media posts, and status updates is "rude" and "socially unacceptable" then I'm fine with being outright obnoxious, but I know people who feel that doing that would cost them relationships and status and it looks like they're probably right.

I don't remember any massive campaign to convince people that imposing that standard on others is fine, but maybe we need one to let people know that they're allowed to put their phone down for a few hours and set sane boundaries with their friends and employers.

I've definitely faded out of connection with folks easier by behaving asynchronously to messages. I'm also not on social networks, so you'll need to Signal/SMS/email me. Sometimes I'll bring up the Deep Work book and that I believe strongly that constant distraction is unhealthy to the mind.

To perhaps the majority of Americans, this behavior renders me untrustworthy and forgettable.

Our expectations as a culture (US) on voyeurism and response time have shifted dramatically in this regard since the popularization of the iPhone. What's most surprising is so many people are unaware that I haven't changed in this regard. They have.

> I can see how apps have been designed to promote that kind of behavior, but how did they end up getting us to demand it from each other? I missed the memo.

I think it's just an extension of how things were. To me, this is the online version of people dropping by your desk with a "real quick question".

Heck, even e-mail, which is overtly asynchronous, has some people expecting answers "quickly".

Ah, 'Real quick' and 'Quick question'. If you suffer from saying either of these two phrases, ever, know that I think less of you when you do. It's aggressive, dismissive, and presumptuous. Usually patently false. Please stop.

I don't remember anyone saying this a decade ago, because you'd come across as the boss from Office Space.

> I don't remember anyone saying this a decade ago, because you'd come across as the boss from Office Space.

I mean, if nobody did anything that made them come across as Bill Lumbergh, then I don't see why Bill Lumbergh would have been written as a character.

Slightly off-topic, but I started thinking "Wait, how do you measure the effectiveness of your communication platform?"

It's an interesting question because when communication is effective, there's not much of it, at least relative to the information transmitted. However, you can't just optimise for "not much communication" because that could mean the opposite: your system is so bad that it's not being used at all. So either you have to find a way to measure the amount of information transmitted (and compare it to the effort expended in doing so) or... something else?

This is one of many reasons that I've been implementing my own chat client.

Yeah, I would never add presence to a chat app. I hate, hate, hate it.

I started using Discord a few years ago and accumulated friends with whom I regularly chat. If I leave Discord off, they're like "oh you haven't been online in such a long time, I thought you were dead". Or if I chat while I have the thing set to idle they're like "oh lying about your idle status because I'm annoying you" and things like that.

It is such a chore to maintain people's expectations. I wish they never added this feature to the app, because my friends will guilt me into turning it back on if I turn it off.

Slack is similarly bad. Like if someone wants to step out of work to go for a walk in the middle of the day, I don't need to know about it. It's none of my business. They can reply to my messages when they have time.

The solution here is to login, set yourself to away/invisible and never make it active.

The activity sign is useful for most people.

> my friends will guilt me into turning it back on if I turn it off.

like many things in life, the solution here is simply to be assertive.

Easier said than done, I know, but if you can convince yourself to just say, "sorry, can't do" you'll be happier in the end.

> Or if I chat while I have the thing set to idle they're like "oh lying about your idle status because I'm annoying you" and things like that.

Surely at some point they'll notice you've been on idle or do not disturb for 90 days straight?

It sounds like you may want to search for lower-maintenance friends.

This is the social equivalent of "rewriting from scratch" and many people are (rightly) averse to it.

I think at least an attempt to explain one's expectations to one's friends would be warranted before plainly starting over with a new social group.

> One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead.

This is lost on, as far as I can tell, at least 50% of the people I regularly text, despite me explicitly pointing this out to them.

In the years before email and texting and even ubiquitous answering machines, when phone calls were all you had, there were people who could not let the phone ring without picking it up. I see people respond this way to text messages now. They not only have to pick up the phone to read the message immediately, but they have to engage with the conversation immediately as well. (And not just for work messages.)

I don't know how people live that way...

I just do it so I don't forget. If I don't respond within 5 minutes, it's going to get lost. I'm the same with email, I respond as quickly as possible so it's done and the ball is passed on to the next person.

That's how I am. I don't like responding ASAP, but the alternative is no response at all (or suddenly responding six months later).

> I don't know how people live that way...

Based on what I've observed, in a state of constant low level anxiety interconnected with certain weird societal expectations of activity/behavior on popular social media (facebook/instagram/twitter/snapchat/tiktok/etc)

Better yet, for some people, the expectation of this mostly-async communication is that you will respond as quickly as they type.

My adult son deals with anxiety, and when he's stressed, I'll get multiple texts in a row. If I'm not responding for some reason, one of them will be "???" as in, "hello, are you going to respond?"

A bit of temperature-lowering, sanity enhancement, comes from using the auto-set sleep/focus settings in iMessage, and training him to understand that random texts in the middle of the night can, and will wait until we're awake enough to look. If it's really that critical, a phone call can still work.

Indeed, I should have mentioned that as well. Nearly all of the people who compulsively[0] respond ASAP have an expectation that their recipients will do so as well. Sometimes they have an anxiety response, like apparently your son, sometimes they have an anger response, or a hurt response… it's like "expectation is the root of suffering" in action.

[0] - As opposed to people who do so for other reasons, like others in these threads have mentioned doing.

Regarding anxiety vs anger vs hurt response, why pick just one? Indeed, our son's expectations are sometimes pretty unidirectional. (Mental health stuff, depends how he's doing at the time.) With some effort though, this gradual training of expectations seems to help.

Similarly perhaps, I came across a suggestion recently for scheduling email as a matter of course. I tend to respond immediately (if not too intrusive), or make a note to come back to something I mean to respond to, but this idea was that perhaps some time lag as a regular thing makes sense. If I recall correctly, the recipient is not only fine with the delay, but actually considers your response as more worthwhile, because you likely put some time into it. Perception vs reality? If perception is what matters more, that might be a reasonable approach.

I don't even like read receipts for casual communication apps. I feel like they only cause stress. I don't want people to know if I'm read something because I may have read it but be too busy to respond and need to come back to it later, but I don't want the person thinking I'm ignoring them. And on the other side of things, I don't want to stress myself out repeatedly checking if someone read my message.

Huh. I've always assumed chat apps were for synchronous communication. If they are for asynchronous, then why do they exist? Email already solves asynchronous communication pretty well, and it is even decentralized.

For many people, email is better used for thoughtful long form messages, while chat is better for short quick thoughts. This is mostly a social difference, with a bit of UX thrown in.

From a technical standpoint I don't see how there's much of a difference, given that devices are almost always connected to the Internet and almost all chat, messaging, and email services people use have a third party server that persists a message regardless of the recipient's "presence" at the time the message is sent. These services have converged, apart from a few idiosyncrasies and perhaps some waning differences in the social expectations of a particular service.

Huh. AIM wasn't able to do asynchronous, right? Maybe I'm showing my age, haha.

AIM added offline messages at some point, although I don't remember when. ICQ had it from the beginning (I think originally the client may have polled the server rather than running a persistent connection?, so the server had to store stuff a bit anyway; clients would do p2p messaging if both were online and could connect, otherwise would fall back to sending messages through the server)

According to my memory AIM didn't support that in the late 90s and early 2000s, and that was a key advantage of ICQ. But I mean in the last 15 years or so, corresponding roughly with the rise of ubiquitous smartphones (and foreshadowed by cell-connected PDAs and some feature phones).

> One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in having asynchronous communications.

On the contrary, the main advantage of chat protocols over e-mail is ability to handle synchronous communication. If i got by with asynchronous communication, i would stick with e-mail.

Email suffers from other problems. Chat protocols have the ability to be either. It is a small act of violence to expect a chat message warrants an immediate response.

To me, the most important feature of any messaging service is to queue up until I'm ready to respond. I'm either asleep or awake. And if I'm awake, I'm probably thinking of something else. It's a happier life if I finish that thought before starting a new one.

I see situations when broadcasting my availability to some of my contacts is important.

I see cases when doing so is counterproductive or uncomfortable.

An obvious solution, of course, is to make it an option. Default hidden with per-contact overrides, or the other way around.

Of course, XMPP has a better part of it implemented, but not all of it, and without a sleek UI. When Jabber still was popular enough, I could subscribe to (or unsubscribe from) status change events, per contact, using Pidgin. Worked pretty well.

It’s interesting, because I remember Steve or somebody saying this was a selling point of iMessage. “No busy indicator, no offline state, just send your message and they’ll get it on all of their devices”. Then at the last WWDC they go up there and show how cool it is that iMessage will now tell your contacts if you are in Do Not Disturb (and allow them to override it). You can opt out, of course, but I guess people really like the busy indicator?

> I guess people really like the busy indicator?

I think people sometimes just really don't want others to think that they are ghosting them, so a busy indicator serves that purpose: "I'm working right now, not purposefully ignoring you, please be patient, or override it if it's urgent."

I don't personally use it, but I understand the sentiment.

Telling people I'm in DND is my phone telling them that I'm asleep/in a movie/working/whatever. Since some people have emergencies, give I gotta them the ability to bust through is nice. That ability used to only happen with repeated calls in a short period of time, and that's annoying.

I suppose I look at it as less of an "away" message and more of a feature to override the DND.

> “No busy indicator, no offline state, just send your message and they’ll get it on all of their devices”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wfG8ngFvPk

Blocked in US/Canada, appears to be this? https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2v6793

That's a very strange perspective. If I don't care about presence, I'll use email. The whole point of IM is to have synchronous realtime communication.

> The whole point of IM is to have synchronous realtime communication.

No. That's one capability. But the whole point of IM is to have online communication. Realtime is one possible aspect. I very much prefer asynchronous communication even in IM.

If I want synchronous communication then... call or use voice chat.

The “I” in IM means instant. It was meant to be synchronous because email was too asynchronous.

Instant does not mean synchronous.

Instant does mean synchronous, as in instantly, immediately. And that is because when it was invented asynchronous communication is by default, as users cannot afford to be online all the time. So instant is the feature. You may argue it has changed, but it is false to dispute the original intent.

No, synchronous means synchronous. Instant means instantly, sure. But that does not mean synchronous.

You can send an instant message. That's instant. It does not mean the recipient must, or even should feel that they must, reply immediately. You won't know if the other person has read your message and decided to reply or not. That's not synchronous at all.

A voice conversation, on the other hand, is synchronous. You know when the other person has decided to leave the conversation or simply to not reply. That is synchronous.

> You may argue it has changed, but it is false to dispute the original intent.

I am not arguing it has changed. I am stating that it simply isn't what you claim it to be. That might be how you use it but that doesn't mean that everyone should feel obligated to.

You can also send an email instantly. So, obviously, in this context instant means synchronous, and not just immediately, otherwise there would be no point to put it into the name as a differentiating factor compared to email.

Nowadays it's usually instant, but back when I first got online and me and my friends used AIM, email would often take several minutes and occasionally hours to arrive.

Calling is not the best most of communication for a lot of synchronous use cases. Talking about code is easier with chat, so you can copy and paste, and also keep history of what was talked about.

Also, voice calls are not always easy to do when you have other people around or are in a noisier environment.

I used to like the last online status until I had a girlfriend who read too much into it. That function got turned off with no regrets.

> i'll take it one further and say that having a messenger app that shows "online" or "active" status is not something I like

I'll take it even further than that and say that I don't like when there are markers for "read" versus "not read". In a vacuum, yes, it's useful, but there's a very common implicit assumption that one is obligated to respond as soon as a message is marked as "read", and that not doing so is an intention slight. The issue with this for me is that sometimes I might be busy enough that I'd want to respond to time-sensitive or otherwise important messages but would prefer to wait to respond to less urgent messages at a later time. I can't easily figure out which of the two categories a message falls in from just a short preview sometimes, so I end up leaving messages unread until later just to avoid accidentally causing someone to think I'm ignoring them. While I also find myself sometimes wanting to know whether a message is read or not, I don't really think it it ever makes me happier to know, since at best I'll gain no information, and at worst I'll end up feeling bad due to worrying that I've been intentionally ignored. Because of this, I generally turn off the feature whenever possible (even though it's generally symmetric that way), but an alternative might be to opt into it per conversation; there are definitely some people who I know I'd like to have it on since we mutually are secure about where we stand with each other, and knowing whether they saw my messages would be useful for purely for logistics (e.g. if I missed a message from my significant other asking me to pick something up while I'm out, they might be able to order online in time for it to come the next day). For the vast majority of my conversations though, I'd rather it just be turned off.

There is one thing for which a "read" status is very useful is so you know your message have actually been received.

One big gripe I have with email is that with some providers, is that unless I receive a reply or a bounce, I never know if my email was actually received. Was it ignored? Sent to the spam folder? Though now that I think of it, you could have a lying "read" status, where everything that is sent to the spam folder is marked as "read".

> For something like a work place communication tools such as Slack I can understand the purpose of setting yourself active or idle manually to indicate whether you're available for messages, or in a different time zone, or whatever. That's a different use case.

I just never set myself online, I wave in a morning, I wave at the end of the day but I treat slack as async, I read the message and reply on my schedule.

I expect the same of the people I lead, we are developers, we require been able to block out chunks of distraction free time to work properly.

Hm! I just looked at my Signal as someone was messaging me and the dots were there when they were typing. Do you turn them off somehow?

I see it in Settings, Privacy, Messaging, and toggle Typing Indicators.

> i'll take it one further and say that having a messenger app that shows "online" or "active" status is not something I like.

That's actually something we don't do in Cardinal, but there are a couple of places where you can see online status because we do show live edits in our docs, but that's for (hopefully) obvious reasons.

Every time I set up a new slack account I set my status to appear offline. In the same way that I don’t want others to change their behaviour whether I’m typing or not, I don’t want someone to message or not message me based on an indicator which isn’t always accurate.

No, you wouldn't call me because I wouldn't pick up the phone. Real-time chat is fine.

I never had a phone number for anyone I chatted with on IRC. Same with ICQ.

> I like how Signal just shows that the person exists as a contact. Whether they're awake or not, or active, or idle is opaque to me and I'm totally fine with that.

Signal does show whether the recipient is typing, if you have the chat open.

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