[HN Gopher] I Built That "So-and-So Is Typing" Feature in Chat a...
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I Built That "So-and-So Is Typing" Feature in Chat and I'm Not
Sorry (2014)
Author : wlkr
Score : 37 points
Date : 2020-10-08 11:30 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| silveroriole wrote:
| I don't mind this behaviour. It can be difficult to coordinate
| when you don't know whether the other person is done yet or not.
| Back in the old days we used to, as the end of the article says,
| send lots of little bits of text to deal with this (to older/less
| internet-savvy people's great annoyance, as they treated chat
| just like email, and would be furious when their wall of text was
| responded to with half a sentence!) but it made the chat very
| disjointed and you'd end up having to deal with multiple
| simultaneous stands of conversation. Anyway, the real problem is
| people who ask "what were you typing?" when you delete your
| message or take a long time. You don't want to know!
|
| I've never used a 'live' chat like he describes but I really like
| the idea. Is there anything modern that provides that?
| throwaway287391 wrote:
| > Anyway, the real problem is people who ask "what were you
| typing?" when you delete your message. That seems so rude to
| me!
|
| I've never actually had this happen to me, but I nonetheless
| fear it will 100% of the time I start typing something and then
| delete it. In any IM application that has a typing indicator
| (especially Slack at work -- I shudder at the thought of typing
| out a long message in #general), I've taken to drafting
| messages that require any non-trivial degree of thought to type
| in a separate box, e.g. a message to myself, and then copy-
| pasting it into the actual chat.
| vernie wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc
| marketingPro wrote:
| In all fairness to the Author, people make up excuses for their
| behavior to justify it.
|
| He may actually be deeply conflicted but this is a defense
| mechanism.
| grawprog wrote:
| >I'd rather know what the other person were typing as she typed
| it.
|
| >And it used to be that I did. Long before instant messaging
| programs even existed, there was a Unix program for chatting
| called "talk" (and variations like "ytalk" and "ntalk"). The
| interface was not like that of chat programs today, where you
| type a message in the bottom, then hit Enter to send it over the
| wire to your friend. Instead, talk split the screen in half and
| transmitted everything you typed letter by letter. If you typed
| something and then deleted it, your friend would see the whole
| gaffe. Your text and your friend's text were never combined into
| sequence.
|
| I have to admit, i'm not sure if I share the author's enthusiasm
| for such a system.
|
| It would be heavily dependent on who i'm talking to. If this were
| the default way of messaging with no other options, this would
| get a hard no from me. But, with certain people in certain
| situations, a modern version of this would actually be pretty
| nice.
|
| Still, I wish overall there were more options for disabling
| things like typing indicators, read reports, constant online
| status indicators altogether. My biggest problem isn't so much
| their existence, but the inability to fully disable them in most
| cases.
| dguo wrote:
| I loved this feature when I first experienced it in Google
| Wave. I don't think it belongs everywhere, but exactly as the
| article author says, it makes the conversation feel smoother
| and more like I am actually talking to someone in real life
| because I can think about what they are saying as they are
| typing it.
|
| In a real life conversation, you digest in real time as you
| hear the other person. You don't have to wait for chunks of
| their thoughts.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| (Talking about Google Wave) I liked it in theory! In practice
| it felt super awkward and almost privacy-invasive, but I
| think that's because we weren't use to it. If it became
| commonplace, it would ultimately seem more natural.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Email is all of that disabled.
| boogies wrote:
| (as long as you your client doesn't load tracking pixels
| wrong) Edit: the article: "Gmail tells you if your friend is
| typing, and whether there's any text left in the box."
| snazz wrote:
| Doesn't Gmail load and proxy all external images anyway? Am
| I remembering wrong?
|
| Of course, not everyone uses Gmail, but if it loads all
| images whether or not they're opened, tracking pixels are
| much less useful.
| boogies wrote:
| IIRC their servers cache them the first time you open an
| email, only preventing them from triggering _again_ if
| you open the email more than once
|
| _EDIT_ : it looks like it doesn't even do that, and
| "might even benefit email marketing, for sure not blow it
| up" if this isn't out of date:
| https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-
| works-...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| I wish email supported this at the corporate level.
|
| It wastes time when someone sends an email to a team of 5
| people and they're all independently working on the same
| reply.
| yarone wrote:
| Lots of "Live chat" customer-support type systems do it this
| way. You can see what your prospective customers are typing as
| they type. Every character, backspace, etc.
|
| A bit creepy and violates privacy expectations, I think.
| whiddershins wrote:
| What. Someone should do something about this. I absolutely am
| shocked by this.
| drewrv wrote:
| It is really terrible. https://lifehacker.com/customer-
| service-chat-services-see-ev...
| jghn wrote:
| The live feed of talk/ytalk/etc was a mixed bag. If the person
| you were chatting with was a decent typist it was great as you
| could process what they were writing as they were typing.
|
| But much more often the person on the other end was super slow,
| constantly making and then slowly fixing their typos, etc. I
| spent most of my time getting frustrated watching them muddle
| through
| Baeocystin wrote:
| I hated the behavior then, I hate it now, and will continue to
| despise it in the future. I am not being hyperbolic in my
| adjective choice. I have seen real work drama over this sort of
| thing, because people misinterpret the 'is-typing' as 'is-paying-
| attention-to-me', and the inevitable long delays, short replies,
| forced focusing on waiting for someone to finish... It is an
| anti-social antipattern from beginning to end.
| infogulch wrote:
| I think a big part of the problem is that the feature's
| implementation doesn't always align with the author's intended
| drafting / published status. The feature just picks the closest
| outcome that happens to be measurable (e.g. "author typed in
| draft box in the last 0.5s" or "draft box is not empty string")
| without regarding how a notification of that measure maps to
| the social dynamics of IM communication.
| marketingPro wrote:
| I run a popular website and people find me on various social
| media accounts. People usually ask questions or give
| feedback.
|
| I cannot reply to all of them right away. I may be able to
| reply nightly with a major reduction in productivity.
|
| I know the "seen" is a real issue. Most of the time I need to
| think about it.
|
| And me personally, I'm offended if someone "sees" my message
| and doesn't respond. I'm sure others do too, even if I
| respond within 1 week.
|
| The internet is not IRL. I manage more relationships than
| would be possible.
| fimdomeio wrote:
| Both that and the read status destroyed the charm of chat to
| me. Before I could be fast or take 2 days to answer but it
| would mean that I would take my time to do a proper answer. Now
| it means I'll ignore messages for a bigger period because I
| don't want the other person to see that I read them, and then
| I'll right much faster because I don't want to person to see 6
| interrupted "... is typing".
| hobby-coder-guy wrote:
| Write
| nicbou wrote:
| This is especially difficult when receiving messages you
| can't immediately deal with. Yes I'm online, and yes I saw
| your message, but now is not a good moment. No I don't hate
| you, I'm just not currently available. I hate having to
| tiptoe around the notification to avoid marking it as read.
| superkuh wrote:
| I hated it in the open source chat application Retroshare so
| much that instead of using a pre-compiled version I edited the
| source to disable the activity send notifications from my
| client.
|
| After doing that I noticed the function actaully sent the
| message "etc etc is typing..." and you could change that
| message to arbitrary strings. Unaltered clients then display
| the arbitrary string instead of a "is typing" one.
| dvtrn wrote:
| _I have seen real work drama over this sort of thing, because
| people misinterpret the 'is-typing' as 'is-paying-attention-to-
| me'_
|
| A way to counter this is by tactfully making your boundaries of
| availability unabimguously and abundantly clear and intentional
| where you can. Once you've communicated this boundary, enforce
| it. Defend it with all your might but with discretion for when
| it may need bending (but not breaching).
|
| No need to carry the burden of guilt or shame because you're
| making a deliberate attempt to triage where your attention is
| going at a given time with so many dings, pings and alerts all
| yammering for our collective attentions.
| Baeocystin wrote:
| >Once you've communicated this boundary, enforce it.
|
| I 100% agree with you that setting clear professional
| boundaries is a necessary thing to do. I am also of the
| opinion that a big part of that is to not use tattle-chat
| systems whenever possible, because they actively work against
| exactly this.
| x87678r wrote:
| I dont mind that, what drives me nuts is the people who say "hi",
| then wait for you to say "hi", then they start typing the message
| they wanted to send, taking 5 minutes to write a short essay,
| while you're sitting there distracted and waiting.
| analyst74 wrote:
| I hear a lot of people express this sentiment, and I honestly
| don't fully understand the frustration.
|
| Why do you have to wait for them to type out the real message?
| Is there some social/messaging etiquette that I'm breaking by
| ... read and get back to them when I have time?
| notJim wrote:
| They've already potentially interrupted you by sending you
| that "hi". But the "hi" contains zero content. And worst of
| all, they often wait for your reply, which means you have to
| actually do something to get them to tell you what they
| wanted to tell you.
| MereInterest wrote:
| Each time that they do, have an auto reply set up to respond
| with https://www.nohello.com/2013/01/please-dont-say-just-
| hello-i... ?
| x87678r wrote:
| Nice. https://www.nohello.com/ is easier to remember, I'll
| start doing this.
| yesenadam wrote:
| I like it. But in the second example they've already finished
| typing the whole question by the time they said Hi in the
| first.. then we're told the second way finishes "minutes
| sooner"? Hmm. That appears to make no sense.
|
| _Not wasting the other person 's time_ is however super-
| important, and a great fast test of whether someone is
| considerate enough to be an online friend or not.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| I agree. I have a coworker who does this on the phone too.
| "Hey, how are you?", ugh. Look, you didn't call me and
| interrupt whatever I was doing to chit chat, tell me what the
| damned problem is.
| czzr wrote:
| As often, xkcd nailed it: https://xkcd.com/1886/
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Yeah Yahoo IM had that, but they used different servers for the
| 'activity' messages and the actual text. So you could get the
| "typing" indication _after you had received the message_. It was
| often out of order, and very confusing.
|
| Our message app (Sococo) was rigorous about sending activity
| messages, from peer to peer. Not periodically; just when typing
| began or 'timed out', or when focus was gained or lost (desktop
| app). So a minimum of messages got sent, not the barrage of ping-
| style message the other guys sent.
| orev wrote:
| It makes you feel like once you start typing something, you have
| to at least send something, even if you change your mind about
| replying.
|
| And I'm always skeptical of these "I invented it" type posts. The
| talk command on Unix actually allowed you to see what the other
| person was typing in real time, letter by letter.
| leetcrew wrote:
| > The talk command on Unix actually allowed you to see what the
| other person was typing in real time, letter by letter.
|
| the author mentions this in the article.
| [deleted]
| redis_mlc wrote:
| > And I'm always skeptical of these "I invented it" type posts.
|
| FYI: I know most of the celebrity nerds in Silicon Valley, and
| generally the technical origin stories you hear about are
| actually true.
|
| The most inaccurate stories are around who cofounders are - one
| is invariably "left out" later on. (See the recent reddit
| news.)
|
| Because of my knowledge of above, when I worked at a unicorn
| and saw a slide listing 4 cofounders, and asked where the 4th
| one was, got silence. :)
| scubbo wrote:
| This doesn't bother me at all.
|
| It's the person who invented Read Receipts that really needs to
| apologize.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Skype's "cat is typing" animation when a bunch of keys are held
| down was cute, though. Who did that one?
| floren wrote:
| I seem to remember that on one of the chat services, there was a
| trick to see what the other person was typing before they hit
| Enter. Something like the client actually sent updates as the
| other user typed, and your client would receive it, but not
| display it until the message was marked "sent"... but third-party
| clients could just show you the in-progress messages. Anyone
| remember this?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Not that, but similar: an MSN messenger clone would pop up a
| window once someone else opened a chat window with you, before
| they sent a message.
|
| Was fun to say "hi" while someone was writing an initial
| message to you.
|
| Dunno why I told my friend that her sister often opened a
| window (to see my picture presumably) without ever sending a
| word...
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