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Comment by somewhereoutth | Hacker News Reader

> one has become such a dominant feature of my social life that it is simply named “The Girls,” as if there were no other girls. (The act of naming of a group chat in iMessage indicates, to some degree, its staying power, no matter how silly the name itself may be.) Thus “The Girls” has become one of the first places any of us would look to make social plans. At least, I think so — it is highly possible that for one or another of us there is another group chat, totally unknown to me, that is more important.

I'm a Gen X guy, but this is exactly how it works nowadays. WhatsApp of course, not iMessage in Europe.

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+1 WhatsApp. I was in early of Facebook and used it delightedly for a few years. Then it just went spammy for me and I also didn't like that people seemed to drift towards using it to show off their lives as opposed to connecting with people. WhatsApp groups on the other hand by virtue of not being public are more personal. In some of my groups we have full on debates which I think if they were public some members of the group would be cancelled.

Millenial here, my group of friends is probably falling outside of the norm, but there's been a distinct drive away from social media in general. A good half does not have any public social media like Twitter, Instagram etc ("private" being things like whatsapp or telegram). A good quarter has reverted to old Nokia phones and respond to emails within 3 business days.

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.

> A good quarter has reverted to old Nokia phones and respond to emails within 3 business days.

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.

I feel like this is standard since 2015

Sounds right to me.

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.

WhatsApp said it cost 99 cents, but I don’t recall ever being charged for it. I distinctly remember installing it on my parents’ phones with a credit card number in the App Store that had no credit, and it always worked fine.

How dismally tiny this all seems!

I miss being part of something that felt like a community. I don't know where to find that anymore.

Discord and telegram both offer that?

I'm glad to hear that and I wonder what I am missing. How have you found your way into community there?

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.

I don't use telegram, but I know others who do, and there are certainly general group chats, though I mostly hear about conspiracy people and crypto.

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.

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