Groups chats work as social networks because of social pressure tricks:
• Read receipts
• Displaying "John was online 43m ago"
• Continuous pressure to reply "enough"
• Small chats can have strong norms (no outrage/politics) implicitly enforced per reply
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John Backus Retweeted John Backus
Context on group chats as social networks. I have a handful of group chats for each combo of close friends (8 with
@rsnous). I’ve heard many people talk about moving to group chats after the Twitter outrage machine ruined sharing in public for them. Thus:https://twitter.com/backus/status/1037919267763544066 …John Backus added,
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When chat apps display "John was last online 43m ago", that creates pressure to respond quickly to people. If there is _anyone_ you want to respond to now, opening Messenger lets others know you could have responded but didn't.
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Accidentally opening a message you're putting off stinks b/c now you only have 2 options: shamelessly ignore it or respond soon Chats apps w/ "last active at" and read receipts remove plausible deniability, forcing us to calculate _exactly_ how friendly we want to be to someone.
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Small group chats (≤5 people) create a constant "are you in or out?" pressure. Everyone knows who responds and shares the least. If you're in a 4 person chat w/ daily enthusiastic activity from the others, they might move to a 3 person chat w/o you if you don't engage for weeks
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Replying to @backus
Huh. I'm in a bunch of group chats (including Slacks and Discords) that I basically ignore they're all still quite active. I wonder if this is because those are closer to being full-on communities
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Replying to @sonyaellenmann
Yeah how big are they? I think the optimal size is 3 or 4 and things start going downhill fast after you pass 5 people
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Replying to @backus
yeah def bigger than that. too high-volume for me to keep up with
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Yeah I almost never keep up with those then. After a certain size, it makes sense to graduate from chat to something like a mastodon instance
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