People are so weird: it used to be that using the Internet a lot was seen as anti-social, now everyone's addicted to phones and if your message bubbles aren't the right color you're the weird one. It's just a stupid chat app.
It's completely awful we're strong-armed into having 6 different chat clients that send text messages because of gate-keeping. Chat has been fully commoditized since about 2000 or so.
I'm so tired of chat apps. Every chat app is the same crap done over and over again... But apparently its 'new' and you need to download it because its the only one X uses, yayyyy. It's like scheduling: the problem was solved already but everyones obsessed with redoing them.
Does anyone who works on apps / software / whatever ever consider how tiring it is to have to adopt all this sheet? It's like the digital equivalent of fashion. Literally just waxes and wanes between apps that are all functionally the same based on trends.
The most ridiculous thing about all these chat apps is not that they all essentially do the same simple thing as each other (send text), but that they each managed to do it in a way that was incompatible with every other chat app. It's almost as if there was some omniscient God of Incompatibility out there pulling the strings.
The one exception being any sort of chat app. Now they're going from crusty old Hangouts to Chat while plenty of other chat apps have been far more polished for a long time
It's absolute fucking garbage when it comes to text chat. It boggles my mind that they had so many examples on how to do it right and fucked it up so badly
I blame the chat apps more for this tbh. Coming from a long history of using IRC, using separate messages is a completely normal way of dividing up one's text, and it was fine because N lines of text in a single message wasn't hugely different from N lines of text over multiple messages. For the most part, the end result takes up the same amount of screen real estate, and I honestly like being able to send out thoughts piecemeal in a more active discussion--it lets others start priming their response before I'm done, or read through it as it's being said, versus having to wait for a complete set of messages. It's really one of the differentiating features that made me prefer chat over email or forums back in the day.
Slack, Discord, etc. wander in and turned chat into a _product_, and specifically a modern mAxImIzE eNgAgEmEnT product. No fucking chat app should send as many notifications as Slack and Discord do default, and they also shouldn't return to the same noisy default every time you join a new server, but they do. There's a good reason for this: constant pings make you use the app more because human brains are easily distracted, doubly so when something has been crafted to grab your attention. This probably results in a mix of actual stickiness and garbage interaction stats that product managers toot in internal meetings to demonstrate how good their ping flood is to clueless upper management, but the end result is that the distractathon defaults are just accepted as the way things are.
Chat apps have been around for literally decades. There’s plenty of prior and current competing apps that do essentially the same thing and use a fraction of the resources.
Yeah it's not new. The chat feature has existed for a short while, too, which deserves more fame as being an e2e encrypted multi-device IM system that isn't tied to your phone number.
I'm not sure what you mean here. Chat isn't "old", its just taken for granted now. What's more likely is that sharing every bit of irrelevant data about your life will go the way of chat, in that it becomes so commonplace that isn't not even thought about anymore.
It's completely awful we're strong-armed into having 6 different chat clients that send text messages because of gate-keeping. Chat has been fully commoditized since about 2000 or so.
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