There's no source of that signal that someone is open to chitchat these days, and it's in my opinion kind of killed what was once great about online communication.
People used to be offline by default. You had to “connect to the internet.” Open MSN, go into forums and check the latest unread messages, come back from a concert and manually upload the photos to your Fotolog or wherever. Now it's the opposite. We are online by default. The expectation is that we're always connected and respond quickly. Going to a sports event or a concert? You have to post a story to Instagram from that very place, not when you get home. Someone sends you an email or a WhatsApp message? You’re expected to reply as soon as possible.
That’s what I miss most about the internet—the idea and the feeling that I would go online when I wanted to, not that I lived inside the internet 24/7.
I've culled my notifications substantially and my life is better for it. But I miss that feeling of firing up AIM and seeking out someone to chat with. Or someone spotting my arrival and immediately saying hi.
I realized yesterday that I don't use phones like others do. I want to be in airplane mode whenever my phone is locked. Not Do Not Disturb mode. I want my modem off. I don't want any phone calls, ever. I'll get to your messages when my flow state has subsided.
But when I unlock the phone, I want the modem to automatically come back on. I am subliminally tapping into the heyday of AIM. I'm expressing "i'm free. what's up?!".
Problem is, it's not an occasion to anyone else out there. Most people always want to be available and I have a hard time understanding why.
It's more present but also more invisible now, yeah.
Yes, we aren't technically near a keyboard most of the time today, but we are never AFK in a conceptual sense. Even when sleeping.
I've been reading this on HN for years but I've always been puzzled by it because it's both so different from my personal experiences and seems so divergent from the types who hang out on HN.
From around my mid-20s the expectation to be always on in any of my friend groups just evaporated. Until we hit our 30s there was still a general expectation to read socials after work hours but even then as we got older many of us were too drained after work to do much. Then once we hit our 30s the expectation was that our partners, homes, and often kids took precedence. None of my friends are posting Stories on Instagram with their newborns.
Now some of my friends do still love being always on their socials but a lot of these friends of mine when not on socials are constantly hanging out at social events or on calls with each other. They'd probably be the neighborhood gossips in an era before telephony.
So I'm curious: is this a real problem or is this a bit of a strawman? What sort of social pressure do you actually receive to be always on your socials? Is this related to going on dates?
A side effect was we didn't have to deal with what Claude Shannon told us happens if everyone is broadcasting - noise increases - no one is really heard - people speak louder - people repeat messages - everyone is getting their energy drained.
Today Broadcast is free. And thats what we see happening.
I am happy to disappoint these expectations. I feel no pressure from it whatsoever. Of course, I'm of the age of default offline, so that has a lot to do with it. Remember coming home to a "machine" to check messages? That was glorious even if it too had a glowing red dot that wanted your attention.
The always on mentality is not worth it and quite tiresome, figuratively and literally. I know it's different for women, but I've met a few that are really into the always on concept where they never leave the house without full war paint because "you never know who you might meet". I'm exhausted just thinking about it.
As someone who twenty years ago published his XMPP presence to his web page (http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/2006/02/27/jabber...) among other oversharing excesses, I have now swung opposite: online presence indicator is the first functionality I disable when I join any sort of forum and my tablet is almost always silent... Asynchronous interrupts least and unbroken concentration is most valuable, so asynchronous mostly - with exceptions for eligible professional contacts and sentimentally close people.
Social networks make people tired/satisfied/overwhelmed of "interacting online", and in the worst possible way: passively, not producing anything and just consuming it.
It sucks.
The other more obviously negative components tired/overwhelmed are more of a hangover effect people have after over indulgence. But they’re addicted so ultimately always go back for more (most people).
It’s weird for me to witness as I never indulged in social media and could always see it for what it is. I watched my wife use and just classified it as a huge waste of time (and had some not so fun, “get off your phone” conversations along the way). Some people are finally coming around to it but a lot of damage has been done and a lot of social fabric has eroded.
Seeking novelty and fulfillment from scrolling vertically are all individually and collectively patterns, including notifications.
Creating is different than consuming when it comes to screens. Separating consuming onto a separate consuming device physically helps.
It sucks because the social aspect of social media has been bent and twisted into squeezing every bit of money out of it. In some regards, people are being forced to consume. Companies do anything they can to manipulate users into continual consumption because it generates money for them.
Even worse now? Companies are rewarding people when users interact with their content. Now people are enticed to create content that purposely angers people so they comment on their content.
I've deleted all of my accounts now - it was just too fatiguing to try and weed your way through the constant pushing of content to get you to watch or interact with instead of what YOU want to see or watch. YouTube is notorious for that. How many times have you gone to the site and instead of searching for something you went there for, you get completely sidelined into something because they present you with a ton of videos that fit what you're interested in?
In the immortal words of Joshua: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"
Dude beat me to it on Skype, I called him just out of the blue and had a nice conversation with him, lived in Denmark as I recall. Really friendly guy. I can't imagine doing that now though, let alone the person on the other end actually picking up.
I was in college during the peak of AIM and it was useful to know who was at their computer or not, which I believe was still viable. Around meal times, we could quickly scan for who was around to see if they wanted to head down to the cafeteria. If they weren’t around, there was no point it asking. For time sensitive messages, online status matters.
It can be modified to never show you're online, or show 'away' or something, but it's similar. It also displays how many are online in a channel on a server, and then you can open the list.
Despite that, however, it still feels 'different' to how it was, but I think we're also 'different'. Being (significantly) older now I have more responsibilities and pressures for my time so I'm less likely (like zero chance) to be sitting idle waiting for random chats.
We'd have to ask those who are, now, the age we were then - but then they also have no frame of reference. My son is often chatting to his friends online, but I think they're exclusively friends from meatspace rather than electronic strangers.
I get that most leisure computing has moved off of desktop to mobile in modern days, but there's definitely enough of us nerds who're on a computer a lot (even if just for work, if nothing else). It can't be any less than in the late 1990s when ICQ was popular.
I do wonder, though, if there’s a gap for a messenger app that runs only while in the foreground in your phone [edit: or tablet or computer!] - or maybe until you next lock the screen, so you can ‘be online’ only while reading, playing a game, or doomscrolling.
There was alot of waiting involved, and I would chat on icq with a lot of random people in Europe. I ended up meeting one person!
The problem is… people are people and do nasty things. I have a good friend who is a few years younger. She found herself on the “information superhighway” at 13-14, blue collar parents who had no idea what she was doing alone on AIM or what that was. She find herself meeting this charming guy… who happened to be in his 30’s.
Learning about how common that was was very sobering… as this thing that represented fun and friends to me ended up being malevolent to many.
Show HN: Coffeehouse, one-on-one voicechat with random HN users
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39067496
Hah, I'm also building something like this for notification purposes. My wife's tablet sometimes doesn't show notifications and she's often not near her phone, so I ordered some ESP32's and LED boards[0]. Going to scatter them around the house and link them to a switch in Home Assistant so I can light them up if I need to get a hold of her. I'm planning a back-and-forth scan effect to make sure they're eye-catching, already named them Cylons.
[0] https://ae-pic-a1.aliexpress-media.com/kf/S9b244caf41934a5eb...
As a result, we were looking into a very similar system where we each have an LED signboard, speaker, and priority lights on the top of a small device that lives on top of our monitors along with an app where she can select "not urgent, but you should know", "when you have a moment", "as soon as you can", and "urgent, right now" in an app, with an optional message, and the device makes a tone and lights the lights associated with the most recent, highest priority message as well as reminding every five minutes.
I'm playing with an ESP32 right now to implement, but it's nice to see that the entire concept isn't entirely unprecidented.
To me, not having any sensory disabilities, that’s a lower cognitive load than banners or other text/icon-based notifications.
Your current setup is, of course, much more interesting.
I highly recommend it to anyone building little functional prototypes of this sort.
/s
Deaf people need this.
# Music Quiz Bot
Existing apps work ok. A lot of paid and don't let you use a specific Spotify playlist.
The only thing annoying about this one is that none of the Discord API wrappers handle audio very well so I've found that this one gets a bit flaky if you're trying to play a lot.
This one is probably like 500 lines of Typescript but a lot of that is for the Spotify API. The game logic is pretty minimal.
# Birthday Bot
This is like 10 lines of Python. It's a cron that reads from a Google Sheet my friends and I keep up to date with personal information. If it's someone's birthday then it'll post a happy birthday message to them.
# Plex Bot
I wrote this before I discovered that Overseerr just has this built-in. My Plex was set up with a webhook to hit whenever new media was downloaded. The bot would post to a specific thread with the metadata about the new media. This included another webserver for serving the cover art from the private Plex metadata server.
# Movie Quiz Bot
Similar to the music bot although I don't think existing apps exist that do this. Essentially it's https://framed.wtf/ except as a game in a Discord channel where random frames are pulled from movies in my media library and everyone competes to name the movie first. This one required some ffmpeg fun to make pulling the stills not take forever. I considered doing static stills or having a cronjob do it, but it's more fun when it's completely random.
But I wasn't able to get on top of its notification system or get past the gamer heavy UI.
Does your friend group consist of mainly techies? If not, I am impressed you were able to get them to use it. Even more so if they were already on it. I tried to get folks to use Signal with me for a bit and it was the most futile endeavor I've ever attempted.
I guess my friend group is somewhat techy - but they aren't on HN. We've been on discord since its inception. We moved to Signal as we wanted to get off Meta products.
Signal has stuck for a couple of friends, but has decidedly not stuck for anyone else - and the ones it stuck for were either already on it or have a privacy bent.
Signal, back then at least, didn't do group chats, or nowhere near as conveniently as Discord. So much so that I don't even know if Signal does group chats now as I only ever use it for one-on-one.
I set up a Matrix server back then too, didn't take. Discord won.
But Signal? It's basically identical to Whatsapp. I had zero issues getting people on Signal and I now use it exclusively. Every friend and family member is on it.
Only works for small groups though. I don't think large communities will have a good time on Signal. Telegram might be better for that.
Nothing that builds up an ever-growing surveillance database on private conversations between friends can be in the running for “best”.
1) Reminder bot for scheduled events.
We're all working adults who all played games as teens together . To actually get us together, we schedule our favorite games for once a month to play for a few hours. We all often forget when they start, so my bot posts a 2 week, 1 week 3 days, and 2 hour notice.
2) RCON bot I run a TF2 server and a Minecraft server. You can manage both via RCON commands via slash commands in Discord. Also the tf2 one monitors player activity and alerts if players are in the server
3. Private server API bot
I founded a private game server for a game that ended service in 2023. The bot reads from our API to make a central list of lobbies and status. It also creates voice channels for each public lobby.
It's also used to help grant items and other admin commands.
4. For April Fools, I made a snarky bot that responded to random messages. It was backed by Gemini.
These have all been fun and novel to make but I've never found a great way to productize them and make money from any of them. Wonder if you've found any avenues there.
Shame on discord for having a lousy privacy stance, but most people aren't on signal for the privacy, most people are on signal because that's where their friends are (and one or two of those friends is there for the privacy).
Until you find that you expected security and privacy and the developer/corporation/investors say, "too bad for you".
This is the warning of Niemöller's famous paraprosdokian.
I can make the decision to use Signal or whatever, but as long as my whole social circle does not do the same, it wont be useful. And since when they do the swap, they have to convince their whole social circle to do the same, this becomes an impossible task. Either you have 10 different apps for different friends that lie on different places on the ethics of privacy, or you just take the easy way out and use what everyone uses.
About 2 years later Twitter came out and I was like "oh, I guess I was on to something." :)
It's nice to hear that this group found a way to maintain the spontaneity.
One big noisy chat for everything is an antipattern, as any group of sufficient size eventually learns.
Organized channels is the way to go and spending time thinking about setup is worth it. Otherwise they develop naturally and haphazardly.
There's plenty to doom and gloom about with the state of tech right now, but this is a good reminder that sometimes even Big Internet tools, with a little ingenuity, can sometimes be repurposed to serve the users and not some corporation's bottom line.
It's kind of a throwback to the olden days where you might stand up an IRC server or something similar just for your friend group. I like seeing people returning to the small internet where it serves as a substrate for real people doing real things.
Personally, in my circle of friends, we use slack (at first the free plan and now a payed plan).
During the pandemic we moved to the payed plan, because of the restriction on members in huddles/calls (and also because we want endless history and our own encryption keys).
Currently we have Game (D&D e.g.), PP and Small-talk channels that we use to have huddles that everyone can join.
Mostly we create other channels on demand to organise things. Or share knowledge, music and so on.
One nice feature with slack is, that you can receive notification if a huddle starts in a channel, also on mobile, if you have the app. I don't know how often we use this notifications to join the small-talk channel. Personally, i join them every other week because i get notified.
PS: If someone from slack reads this, please do a friends plan, something between the free and pro plan :)
I always believed in the power of simple tools and don’t reinvent the wheel.
Good times.
> Over the next year, our group chat (in Signal) was drowning in notifications. A mix of general chit chat, talks on the ever changing news of COVID and the most important - when can people play games and chat. It really annoyed me when people would post on "hey anyone wanna play [game] in 15 mins?", for it to be buried in another 5 messages.
My friend group's solution to this problem is...lots of different group chats. They're all on Google Chat, but we have tons of different ones for different topics: bikes, space, covid/infectious diseases, baking, craft, plants, wildlife, true crime, politics, depressing news, renewables/sustainability, tech geekery, board games, home improvement...
I do miss video chat nights during lockdown though.
Never made it but glad to see these things can work.
Of course, Twitter/X/etc are a far cry from that now-- but it could be worth trying where you and your friends use the service like that.
Here's what I am thinking. You sign in It asks you what you want to do And at what time (hour) in another column and (date) in another column And then it asks you the location
And then we can have a contact-me: which could lead to discord or signal. Or, if you aren't comfortable sharing that info, then you could have a shareable link that you can share with anyone and then they can write their email or whatever and you would get live notifications through mail or whatever platform you decided.
Lemme know if we are on the same page?
EDIT: I have created a mvp but like, the problem is that it's just a form y'know and I just created something where you would input in this information and it would give html and then you can host it and using https://formsubmit.co/ you can use it. Though I guess one of the issues is that you have to validate each form in formsubmit (not good for ephemeral forms) and I guess it also shows email but there's a way to hide it too.
Also, I guess the problems aren't of forms but of discoverability. How do you make people discover your forms but I guess one way could be of having a list of all your forms or just the current ones that you want to show (IDK?) on github pages for example and then you could just share the github pages link to anyone or just have it in a about me section of most messengers?
Also.. Maybe then if you wanted to rather share it to anybody you could create a additional place where anybody can share their forms/such website. But I am not sure if what I've all said is the best user experience.
The event poster can set a collective-commitment-threshold which triggers once sufficient commitment is reached.
Currently working on another web app though...
I'm afraid I can't relate to this at all. I may a bit older and/or I may have less close friends but I prefer a very different kind of social contact that is more like make plans, meet up, rinse and repeat.
Back in the AIM/ORC days I loathed being pinged all the time for chit chat - this system reminds me of that!
It’s great to separate for record keeping, but mostly to avoid forcing the conversation on some organisational thing when the other just needs eg to vent about something at work
I think the "I am here, now" alert does more than the "hey who is around?" message.
But in the meantime if I had to genuinely suggest a method without any friction if you are okay with using code like the author did, then I'd suggest something and lemme know what you think
Why don't you just create a special emoji that would only be used for the purposes of Pin, like (Oh the irony), and then have a signal cli or signal-bot https://github.com/signal-bot/signal-bot where you could do something like /pins and it would show the pins but you would need a different mobile number or account for that and honestly just a big hassle. I could think of other ways but we would never reach the native User experience that signal could provide if it would allow pin natively
EDIT: Even a more simpler way could be if we could just search the chat emojis and we could just search <the pin emoji> and it would show it
Also I am surprised that HN doesn't allow emojis
i eventually moved the bot to glitch.com (rip) where we could collaborate on it and it evolved into a monster of in jokes and utilities. it's going offline this week unless i can find the time to migrate it off glitch
You don't get hundreds of messages per day by writing in email style. You get there if you have a lot of synchronous or near-synchronous communication in chat. It's kind of obvious that voice call suits this better, but there is friction involved in making an actual call.
Discord voice channel might reduce the friction if you make this culture of hopping in and out of it.
This was surprising to me – is this typical of most Discord users (primarily desktop users over mobile)?
Telegram feels like it can definitely do such stuff and I found in my opinion that its way easier to host telegram bot on cloudflare than it is on discord so theoretically you could even have it as a cf worker with a deploy on cf button so as to even people who don't know too much about deploying could use it.
My in-person friend group revolved around the bar we all went to. When the bar shut down, I floated the idea of a group chat but couldn't get anyone interested. No one wants to install another app and get notified more. In olden days, we'd just solve the problem with Facebook, but no one uses that anymore either. My friends are ordinary, normal, overworked people who need an easy option. The bar was that. Show up when you want to connect. Easy.
So now there's nothing. I basically just lost all my friends. We all have each other's numbers but that's just not an option for coordination.
Fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, for making Facebook so shitty it's not even useful anymore for the one thing I ever found it useful for. I hope when we finally start coming for the billionaires, we come for you first.
For my case I was able to convince many friends to connect on various chat platforms of their choice. Some friendships fizzled out, others are still going. And then there are some anew.
Unfortunately a lot of our friendships are essentially default proximity relationships. These tend to not survive as soon as the first obstacle to proximity shows up if not enough people are willing to put in the effort to make it something more.
Perhaps read it, use one of the many discord wrapper apis, and replicate it. He just hooks into one of the many events discord emits and bot sends a message.
Even one of the LLMs can very easily vibe code this…
There’s a line between baking a cake and building a wedding cake where it stops being about the ingredients and starts being about the desired form. https://shunbridal.com/article/how-tobuild-a-wedding-cake
It’s in that context where building software makes sense. You need to link a bunch of different components together to make a greater whole.
The problem isn't one of technical definitions, it's one of performative definitions.
I am technically an Online Communications Solutions Integration Architect, and also a guy posting on an internet forum.
I didn't think of it before but you're right building feels like implying more weight than it feels right. But also I concede this is quite subjective.
