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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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 activity sign is useful for most people.
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.
Surely at some point they'll notice you've been on idle or do not disturb for 90 days straight?
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...
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I suppose I look at it as less of an "away" message and more of a feature to override the DND.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Signal does show whether the recipient is typing, if you have the chat open.
I can understand why it made people uncomfortable—there was a certain intimacy to it. But, conversations are often healthier when the participants are forced to be a bit vulnerable.
We were very young men, and he was coaching me in some situation with a girl.
He died soon after of CF. RIP nion
This is that feature in xmpp, but it didn't send as you typed, it batched up typing and sent just one packet a second (or so) with timed keystrokes in the packet so it could play back a simulation of you typing; thus giving the illusion of live typing while not swamping the network.
There's some demo gifs over on https://www.realjabber.org/ (the more recent website had flash demos only and has since been shut down...this is all a bit delapidated)
IMO, this completely defeats the point.
The advantage of live typing is that I can see what someone is typing sooner, before they're even done, and start considering my response. I want to see their message, or partial message, as soon as possible.
I don't want to see some movie of all of their keystrokes and corrections. It's totally fine if it comes with the territory, but only in the name of reducing latency.
That isn't to say I'm against batching the keystrokes to conserve bandwidth, but don't fake it!
I understand that this may not be an issue for most people, but for me it is just another stress factor which keeps me from interacting with other people (other examples are the reading checkmark and the uncertainty if hitting enter sends the message or not). It would be fine for me if it was opt-in or at least can be turned off.
Until then it didn't even occur to me she might be "watching me type." Such a creepy, distracting, "feature".
The feature is semi-useful when you're in an active back-and-forth, to prevent some "talking over" each other. And if you've just posted in a channel it's nice to see so you know someone is working on a response. But having it light up for DMs, when you're not waiting for a reply, is a misfeature. It's like having someone stand at the open door of the room while they figure out what they're going to say.
That actually works out fine for me, because after I have had it turned off for a while, I forget that the software even has the feature, so although other people see when I'm typing, I don't know that they see it, which is what matters to me!
Another reason is persistence. If a webpage decides to refresh or my browser or system crashes, my textarea content is gone. Sublime Text remembers those unsaved tabs no matter what.
Kinda makes the FBI's fingerprint database look lame in comparison.
A true realtime conversation, rapid chat replies, is fine and sometimes needed when something important is happening.
A true async conversation that is slow and may take days, is also fine.
A semi-realtime conversation though is the horror. A "realtime" conversation where for some reason the other party takes 2 minutes to type any response, every single message. The 2 minutes is enough of a wait to get enraged but too short to go do something else.
My solution: call the person unannounced. Just say: "I figured it'd be quicker to talk directly". This forces them to drop whatever the hell else they were doing and get to the damn point.
Intrusive? No. Not if you let me wait a full hour for what should be a 5 minute interaction.
To use an example: if you're texting me to help you fix your printer while I'm working, I might give you a small bit of my attention out of "generosity" (not the right term but close enough). I'm not getting anything out of this, but I'm not losing much either. But if you want to completely interrupt my flow and force me to give you all or none of my attention, fuck your printer. I have better things to do.
Peter: Hey Me: Hey Peter: Sally called, we need to do that thing. Me: What thing? Peter: It's in the document. Me: Which one? Peter: In your mail Me: Found it. Question about document Peter: Partial answer Me: What about rest of answer Peter: Don't know
Now imagine that dear Peter takes 2 minutes between every single reply. Demanding my full attention for an enormous stretch of time as he himself (that wants something from me) for whichever reason is slow, distracted.
It's Peter being rude here. The equivalent would be calling somebody and then leaving them waiting. You're the one that called. If you want my attention, put in your attention.
Fuck your printer too.
Some are both...
I know at least one such person and I would not miss them for the world.
As I understand, and IME, that's not how attention works. Switching has a large negative effect on focus for me, and when I'm interacting with others who try to do it, it sure seems like it doesn't work for them. I focus on one thing at a time.
Most work, especially software development requires frequent communication. Being able to quickly bounce ideas off people and verify your plans before committing to them is so valuable. I can't count how many times I have been right in the middle of something, had to make a questionable choice, spoken to a coworker just to verify the idea, and they tell me something that completely changes the outcome. Being able to get this done within the hour vs getting it right at the end in review is so valuable.
This hasn't been my experience. Long periods of deep focus are more important than constant connection.
for me, unless we are doing pair programming, i expect communication to be async, even if we are in the same office. you don't get to interrupt on demand, but you better wait until i am mot focused on something else, and respond to your message
Personally I want something that does opt-in. I'll happily share my indicators with people I communicate with regularly, it can be extremely useful to know if a message that's time-sensitive but doesn't require a response was seen ("grab milk too"). I sure as heck don't want to for most public-ish comms though. And I am entirely fine telling people that "I enable it for ~5 people and you are not one of them".
I was trying to keep Slack notifications unmuted in case my manager needs something from me, but I was just getting too much useless crap from Slackbot. Finally I had to mute it completely and tell him to call my cell if anything comes up
When I started setting my status to DND they would keep messaging. If I don't respond within 5 minutes, they grab my lead to do the thing. I'm not repremanded but it just feels bad.
I started just exiting Slack for a few hours in afternoons to get through my work. So they started calling my cell. And if you don't pick up they call and text again.
I'm moving on because it makes my head hurt and I feel like I am getting nothing done as a result.
Slack is just part of the problem but I really think it encourages such culture.
I started my career and remote work with email and a VOIP phone on my desk to talk across borders. As crap as those tools were, somehow the Slack culture has made it worse.
We're focused on making sure pricing isn't per-user because it's annoying to pay an additional bit of rent for each new person on the team regardless of how much they use an app.
I agree about MS Teams being very terrible. I attribute the uptake it has solely to a lot of companies already working with Office 365 (Outlook, Word, Excel, etc) and getting Teams for free -- so why pay for another chat app?
But other people would find the need to correct every typo. And it was painful as crap watching someone with a 5 WPM typing speed and an affinity for typos to get through what they were trying to say. And eventually you move past thinking about a response in real time to screaming "JUST STOP TYPING ALREADY!!!!"
I've spent many hours using ntalk and I love it. It is true though that it lowers the fun when the other person is a slow typist.
i've never used chat that does this, but i have seen a lot of claims it was a misfeature in google wave back in the day.
but still, i could see it being ok, more like verbal conversation.
i defnly agree w/ the linked article that the middle ground of "<soandso> is typing" is a misfeature. the only possible response to that information is to sit there waiting, which is annoying/pointless.
(but nothing beats verbal comms, still. downside of course is that it is "extremely synchronous" and does not archive well.)
We don't have pricing listed because we're still figuring it out.
I actually am in the market for a new chat app for a company I'm building and actively researching this right now. But until you have a /pricing page I'm not going to consider your app. I'm not interested in going through the rigmarole of contacting sales to find this out.
> Predictable pricing Fixed rate pricing means your team will always know what you’re spending on Cardinal. We’ve got plans for teams of all sizes and usage levels, from startup to enterprise
Given that you don't actually have _any_ pricing, predictable or otherwise, this is currently a total fabrication and should be removed from your website until you sort this out.
1. Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be easy and feature minimal friction.
2. Auto-deleting of messages in a DM after X _messages_ (e.g. only the last 100 messages are retained as scrollback). It forces you to document knowledge in more suitable forms; than having it lost in DM silos. Furthermore, it keeps conversations with your regular contacts more candid and natural; but retains the information and context for infrequent contacts.
3. No typing status (thanks Cardinal!)
Cardinal does this! You just share with someone else and you can expand or change the discussion as needed.
It's awesome: people complete each other's sentences, or stop typing when the other person is saying the same obvious thing.
You can say " , ... what's that word again ...?" and the other person will help, then you can backspace over that and continue your sentence.
I've not ntalked in probably over 25 years. Sheesh!
> wait for those above them to speak up first
Do others think of these as universal rules? Common? Situational? Non-existent?
Reading the OP, I fear I don't know the rules at all. I've participated in online forums in every medium and for a long time, and never thought about these. Maybe I've been disruptive or rude without realizing it. :(
For what it’s worth, it does sound like an interesting app with the right ideas.
We're committed to making sure that our pricing isn't per-user, because we don't believe in charging a team more every time they add a new member, regardless of how much that member uses the app.
It went on like that for ten months, then with very little fanfare they opened it to everyone. I didn't find out they finally made it generally available until three months later when they said they were shutting it down due to lack of interest.
I'd say there wasn't a lack of interest, there was a bumbling misalignment of its hype cycle and its availability.
> We all tend to operate within explicit and implicit hierarchies within our teams. Explicitly we know we have a manager we should defer to, and that there are executives and other roles that are important to the team. Implicitly we know there are people with more experience in particular topics or simply more social capital within the team. If you see someone above you in either of those hierarchies, you're more likely to pause and listen, and potentially to decide it's not worth the effort to bring your ideas forward.
> Our goal by removing typing indicators is to help teams build environments where anyone can think through an idea and bring it forward without having to wait for those above them to speak up first. We want everyone to feel included in discussions when they have an important idea to bring to the table.
We make a chat app for teams with a clear chain of command (I don’t know just going by context). By removing this one super-modern chat app quirk we will be able to say that we are “inclusive by default”, even though the whole context that your team operates in contradicts our stated aim.
I don’t know I just think that the hierarchy of the group trumps such trivialities.
Hierarchies definitely trump those trivialities and are a huge hurdle to being more inclusive, but we also see these small tweaks as steps in the right direction.
Typing indicators can be useful in some situations. It's nice not having to wait for someone to finish a thought to know that an issue is being addressed. Heavyweights can jump into a conversation and pause it immediately so people aren't spinning their wheels trying to figure out something they really don't know much about.
It's also useful in 1:1 chats to know if the person on the other side is there or not. If I don't see an indicator (or read-receipt) in the next few seconds, I'll go make another cup of coffee.
They could be filtered out, but it made me think I'd resist that feature in my instant messenger app.
Twist takes it one step further and has no online indicator at all; twist is a somewhat different paradigm though.
