How Group Chats Rule the World
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
There is not really a mention as to how I, and I believe many other, really use group chats. Yeah. Of course I have a couple group chats with people I know... But these do not compare to the ones that I'm in that have been formed entirely online.
The dynamics might be similar but in my experience online (born) groups tend to be much more chaotic and there's a drift of members coming in an out that's quite interesting. For many that I've met they might chat everyday with the people in the group to simply disappear one day and never come back, or perhaps come back a year or two later (if the group is still alive).
I think it stems from the fact that for the journalist "group chats" are linked to apple's technology "iMessage". But for me, when I think of group chats I think of discord servers, IRC channels, etc. I mean, Ive been using group chats for years before the smartphone came, and the experience I had back then is pretty much identical to the one I have today. I was the kind of kid that was in front of the computer all day anyway.
Same. My groupchats are small Discord servers with like 10-15 people. No blue/green text nonsense, don't have to deal with anything related to Meta, and notifications are easily customizable.
I have definitely observed myself communicating more freely there. In a way, it's "anti-social media", in that it solves one of the biggest (in my view) bugs of Twitter, Facebook etc.: Nobody will pin you down with a direct link to a post about an idea you entertained years ago that you've long since distanced yourself from.
Ephemeral communications to me seem like an antidote to the incredible and unprecedented pressure of having to appear 100% consistent across time and social circles.
The author of the article actually calls that out specifically, and then points out she isn't talking about that older phenomenon, but how the advent of smartphones brought this sort of group chatter into our existence no matter where we are at any given time. To people who weren't used to spending all their waking hours in front of a screen already.
From the article:
> This kind of communication has been technologically possible for decades now, but for much of my lifetime it had to occur in fixed locations (in front of computers) at fixed times (when you were all online; this was back when the idea of being “online” or “offline” still had meaning). Then smartphones smashed that distinction.
That said, I've always been amazed at some of these groups I've been a part of. There is a long-lasting group of game developers I was a part of when I was very, very young. Somehow, someway, the site has stayed alive, and I have logged in probably once a year to say hi to old friends. I've never met them in person. We exchange emails maybe... at a half-year, year, or even longer basis. But we always respond to each other eventually. And we've managed to somehow maintain contact in this super strange way.
It's really incredible.
Otherwise people start tuning out the group chats and doing the wrong thing like trying to meet everybody at the wrong crag.
If there were more than 20 notifications in a group chat in an hour, you can bet that half of us have muted it.
Maybe it's just that us ADHD folk hang out with other ADHD folk.
At least WhatsApp also allows turning off all notifications for a group chat other than the ones you're directly tagged in; not sure if iMessage supports the same.
Also, a similar article from the Atlantic from a few months ago that was recently re-featured (also a gift link): https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2023/09/group-cha...
I'm a Gen X guy, but this is exactly how it works nowadays. WhatsApp of course, not iMessage in Europe.
I remember that around 2011-2012 IIRC, back when WhatsApp used to cost 99 cents, half my friends actually paid for it.
The next few years were spent trying to get people to migrate out of other apps (like Facebook Messenger) into it. By 2015 there were very very few people using mainly FB in my circle.
I miss being part of something that felt like a community. I don't know where to find that anymore.
In my (limited) experience with Discord, it has worked exactly like a group chat: each "server" has its own fixed membership, and there does not appear to be any larger community. People don't come and go; I have never met anyone on a discord channel who wasn't already part of the group.
Telegram I have never tried; I thought it was a WhatsApp competitor, and I don't know anyone who uses it.
For discord, it's always an external community for my servers. Either software (home assistant, and a related software netdaemon), a metal review blog (angry metal guy), a game company (owlcat) or a twitch stream (a food truck and a cooking stream). Only my TTRPG group is a closed group.
Sometimes I get a tinge of fomo when thinking about what others do with social media, but when I dwell on it for 5 minutes, I realize I just don't care that much.
How does this affect their professional life?? I simply cannot see that working out well at all.
> Sometimes I get a tinge of fomo when thinking about what others do with social media
I think this is because most people have no idea how to use social media, nor what they could be doing with it. It's poorly defined even at the top level - CEO on down. The "goal" of a new social media company is "growth", which means more users... but for what purpose? Advertisement dollars. It's all kinda backwards in my opinion. It'd like to see a social media company whose purpose is connecting people that want to be connected, in meaningful ways. And yes, they're going to have to charge. A good social media platform that was useful in connecting others and charged around $2-5 a month, depending on how well it actually did what it purported to do, would be something for which I would pay.
As someone who's witty (source: self-evaluation) and a people pleaser, I'm certainly not immune to the phenomeneon; I found the only solution is just avoid it entirely.
I'm not sure I appreciate the difference here (group chat to me is just "micro social media") - maybe it just eliminates some of the toxicity that anonymity and scale bring to the equation?
Soon AI will infiltrate the group chat and the conversation will move elsewhere. People will have a private conversation at any cost.
Tagging an AI in for resolving a quick question or dispute I can definitely see myself using (e.g. getting movie times, resolving a factual question etc.), but if it's anything more than that, I'm out.
If I send you a message and AI transform it, how will either of us know?
That would be pretty easy to prove, and if they do so without informing users about it, they could get fined for huge amounts since it would probably constitute a GDPR violation (i.e. saying that everything is end-to-end encrypted but really sending everything through an LLM hosted elsewhere).
Why should they do any of that? What would they gain?
I'd love to ask the elders this: when did you first start doing group chats, as in multi-user chat rooms with roughly permanent de-anonymized identities?
So, I was in jabber IM rooms in my first job, we didn't use cell phones, but there was an IT department chat, a companywide chat, etc.
Later technologies include lync/skype4biz, hipchat, teams, slack, and zoom.
Limiting myself more to the article's definition (mobile-first group chats), I'd say it was Google Hangouts, GroupMe, WhatsApp, then Signal, now its Signal + discord + FB messenger + all the millions of apps that just should be parts of libpurple / beeper.
But for those of you who remember eternal september, when did the group chat as those dot com babies like me know it first start out?
I met some people on both Compuserve and Prodigy, although I'm no longer in contact with any of them.
Still friends with some people from the WWIV BBS days in SoCal.
1. FidoNet BBSes were one early pre-Internet form ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet ). Even once the early Internet was up and running for some, some of us lived in countries/places where there was no access, and so the loosely-interconnected FidoNet BBS system was the first form of online group communications I was exposed to. There were even some gateways passing email and usenet newsgroups between FidoNet and the Internet towards the end. I had several local friends, we all ran FidoNet nodes, and we did use it for interpersonal communications at times.
2. Usenet - I used this a little bit in the mid-90s for true communication, but mostly that was highly technical in nature, e.g. IETF discussions on protocol development issues, etc. Also lots of using it to download binaries of course, but that's not really chat. I mostly didn't "know" the people I was interacting with, other than by online reputation.
3. IRC - From around 1994 onwards for me (when I finally had real access to the real Internet), on the EFNet IRC network (and a couple others, to a lesser degree). I spent many hours of every day lurking on EFNet's "#hack" channel and several others. There was a real sense of an online-first community, and then there were smaller and often private channels of people you knew from your real life (the other local hackers in your immediate community, or people you met at conferences, etc). I won't defend the culture as necessarily stellar, especially by today's standards, but at the same time, there was a sort of sense of community where it didn't seem to matter much who or what you were in real life, a sort of "if you're here, you're one of us" vibe. I think at least around 1994-1997-ish, IRC was pretty central to my social life (not all of it of course, but still!). Some of it was more anonymous in nature, but a lot of it was people I had met in real life or were even local friends of mine.
iMessage launched in 2011. MMS allowed messaging multiple people from phones before 2008.
Even though I and many in my social circle have had iPhones since summer of 2008, I would say it was WhatsApp that really made group messaging on smartphones blow up, maybe ~late 2009 or 2010.
Edit: Best source I can find says WhatsApp group functionality came out in 2011, so I am off on that, but I do remember WhatsApp functionality being better than iMessage for quite a few years (and I would say except for picture/video quality, it still is).
The specific implementation details do matter; and I think that this fundamental weakness of MMS has created the space for WhatsApp, iMessage, etc to thrive.
One thing I wish more apps offered is per-contact visibility.
In the same way that email allows "group chat", i.e. in a painful unergonomic way that nobody would subject themselves to if it's at all avoidable.
It's also incredibly expensive in many places and has never really caught on outside the US.