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I don't fully remember, but I think it was about One Direction. We very quickly went off on tangents, but I think the feature was implemented so that the third person can spy on the messages but not interact in any way. I sometimes wonder how long they ended up staying in the conversation.


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Great point! The 3 person conversation is a super interesting point, since then the user can take more of a passive role and only occasionally intervene.

I connected ELIZA to a chat client in the 90s, forgot to turn it off, and someone had a 6 hour conversation with themselves. Their persistence was impressive, and I had no idea how to break the news to them. It ended our relationship.

I think ELIZA was better at socializing than I.


They were talking about group chats.

People used to look at me weird when I explained how I was paranoid that someone was routing all of my conversations between multiple people, in an effort to cluster intelligence and intellectual contributions without any participant knowing what they were contributing to.

Take that, therapy. Yes, the paranoia was somewhat imaginative, but it was an exaggeration of something that actually can be mechanized. The people I explained this to didn't believe me that you could create chat streams this way.


I recall it was perfectly common for a group of us to be sat around a table, or on a sofa or somewhere and somebody might drop out of the conversation and take out a magazine or a book, crossword or whatever (in fact Game&Watch and others were a thing back then too) while the rest of us chatted. They might say "I'm still listening", or one of us might bat it out of their hands or something too.

I used this for a while and have had many interesting conversations with people from all over the world, including the creator of the app. I turned it of during the summer holiday last year, and forgot to turn it back on again. Back then it was called My Boss or something similar, and at the start of every conversation a question was sugested to get the conversation started.

I'm pretty sure I experienced the same thing with 2 overlapping group chats.

This doesn't work when someone else outside of the group initiates a conversation.

It's a fantastic feature; meaning I am never distracted on a European Monday morning by what someone sent me on an American Friday afternoon. ;)


> but the chat just pops back up if someone else sends a message to it, so I imagine this would turn communication into a game of whack-a-mole

My first thought exactly. Speaking from experience on our current chat platform, after one conversation on a topic ends (assuming it does definitively end, and doesn't overlap with other conversations), its not long before another begins.


You can tell who is talking with whom.

Actually, thinking about it now, the one thing I would prefer is if you could, in a 2-person room, have one participant's messages come up on the left while your own were on the right, or vice versa.

Then it would be more obvious who said what.


OP. Yea, that was interesting on my end using chat. I probably would hate that on your end as much you did. I did have some pretty fun conversations though. I removed it, because that got exhausting.

Voice messages between more than 2 people? Oh interesting.

I do this with a friend in England that I met and became ultra fast friends with years ago. We traveled Asia together for 2 months. Haven't seen him in years and honestly might not again! But we are buds for life and keep in touch via async voice messages. The other day I sent him a short one asking a relatively intimate question and received a reply with an 18min message. Receiving it felt like Christmas.


I use this in WhatsApp: Created a new group chat with a friend, then kicked her out - now I'm having an empty chat just for myself.

I played a game that had communication like this, and the conversations were often quite odd because of it, hearing half-conversations a fair bit of the time.

And relaying messages to people further away... Though it wasn't anonymous, and people knew where to tell people to send the messages towards.


Yes, I saw it happen in one to one chat last night. It was super useful, as the person on the other end was on a flakey connection...

No, we had a group chat on Telegram that we used during meetings for our snarky comments

"Do you talk to someone else while we're talking?"

Tangential, has someone tried to have two chatGPTs chatting together? Like the good old joke which consists of dialing two random persons and have them discuss together.
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