[HN Gopher] The Future of Group Messaging ___________________________________________________________________ The Future of Group Messaging Author : thejarren Score : 56 points Date : 2021-03-09 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago) (HTM) web link (thejarren.com) (TXT) w3m dump (thejarren.com) | sbuttgereit wrote: | As I recall, wasn't Google Wave something like the proposals in | the article? | josh2600 wrote: | Cool thought. | | I haven't figured out how to intelligently have a content-based | news feed AND a serialized canonical feed of messages without | making an algorithmic news feed. | | Turns out writing news feed is a pain in the butt. | thejarren wrote: | And it depends on the platform's motives if this feature were | implemented. I could see the Apple iMessage approach simply | "Sorting", while FB Messenger would likely use a heavy-handed | algorithm (depending on the size of the group). | | If this concept were given room to evolve, I think both could | coexist. | vlokshin wrote: | Super clear analysis and presentation of the core problem in | group messaging today. Your visuals made the post so easy to | read. | | I'm not sure the conclusion applies for all cases. It may too | easy to get lost in a thread behind an attachment. | | Once I got used to it, iMessage's UX has held up best (posting | twice -- once in focused thread and again in main thread). Not | sure actual post has to happen in both places, but at least the | activity should, otherwise there's too high a risk to lose | something or to have context switching set too high a friction | bar. | thejarren wrote: | Thanks a lot, as I was writing/design I was concerned it would | be a bit over-designed. I learned a lot for next time! | | At a base concept, I agree. I think without a mature version of | this idea, content could become lost rather quickly. A further | iteration would likely be able to deal with some of those | issues (say an sortable/algorithmic feed, and notifications | tab). A way to filter/sort activity might be able to solve some | of those issues. | cglong wrote: | Have you tried the Teams tab in Microsoft Teams[1]? It features a | concept similar to the proposed Content View (the ability to | start a new thread and allowing users to reply within that | thread, grouping contexts and preventing collisions). | Unfortunately, IME, people tend to neglect/not notice this and | will instead create a new thread just for their reply. | | Creating an affordance to help users decide which type of message | they want to send is key to increasing adoption here. | | [1]: Screenshot here: | https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/... | ntw1103 wrote: | I have to use teams for work, and feel this whole approach, and | as described in the article is pretty awful. I think Slack's | threads are better. Just having the reply option, as Discord | does is also most sufficent. Having all this different thread | containers causes the timing of the topic to get lost. I'll | have to keep scrolling up to something important, and expand | it, and then scroll to another on and expand it. then if I make | any response, or want to see the latest that someone said, I | need to lose my place again. | PurpleFoxy wrote: | Teams fixed this mostly by removing the text box in groups and | replaced it with a button "New Conversation" | thejarren wrote: | I haven't seen the Teams implementation, though it sounds a bit | like Slack's approach. I'll have to take a look. | | Unfortunately creating another post/thread for previously | mentioned content is a problem with most platforms (HN & Reddit | included). Calling on older conversations is often as valuable | (or more valuable) as the new conversation, so perhaps a way to | link/reference the posts in a more formal way would be helpful. | cglong wrote: | Having used both, there's a big difference between Teams's | approach and Slack's. Slack assumes a flat list where | messages are in-line by default, but a thread can spawn out | of an arbitrary one. Every message composed from the bottom | bar of Teams creates a new thread, whether it has any replies | or not. | thejarren wrote: | Thanks for the insight. I'll definitely take a look. I | haven't used many Microsoft services in the past couple of | years, so I admit I'm a bit in the dark with their newer | services. | Macha wrote: | Why does this site ask for VR permission? | setr wrote: | IMO *chan's are still the best way to handle this, especially | when you can expand inline. You maintain the linear flow of | conversation, and linearity maintains its status in the | foreground, but you can optionally expand into other the | conversation history through repeated expansion (and following | various trees) | | Organization like in the TFA just totally fucks up the flow of | conversation, and totally ignores the fact that conversation is a | _graph_ , not a tree, and you naturally want to hop between | conversation topics freely. You _want_ to cross-post. | | Not to mention that AFAICT just totally ignores tangents-within- | tangents, a perfectly normal model of communication. | | The fundamental problem though TFA is solving really is the | treatment of persons-involved as defining a conversation, rather | than the topic of conversation itself; The article has really | just recreated BBS thread topics, with permissions scoped to a | group of users. | eximius wrote: | This is mostly what Google Chat looks like. | rektide wrote: | The final proposal comes down to a separation between "chat room" | & "posts", chat where there is social babble, and posts, where | notable & distinct things go. | | I feel like this is already embodied in chat rooms that can pin | messages. That can designate: "here are the active articles of | discussion." This reflects my own bias, that it's not about | having difference places, but more about ways to raise up | content, highlight it, create views & indexes of the information | we browse through. | thejarren wrote: | True, and I do like pinned messages. I don't think a "Featured | Post/Content" necessarily needs to be removed here. | | The intent with this approach is to condense the regular | conversation pieces, whereas the pinned messages typically | contain content that changes less frequently. | Causality1 wrote: | I'd be happy if only my messaging app would let me block messages | sent to a particular group. | ajcp wrote: | The problem example highlights discordant or overlapping | conversational flows and does not include posts or content | sharing. | | The proposed solution is to separate chat and posts/content | sharing. In no way does that solve for the example problem. | | Am I missing something here? | stephen_dev wrote: | I am working on something for group messages but not in a linear | fashion. I've taken different approach to the OP though. | avivo wrote: | There is an insight around messaging which I think this is | getting at, or at least which I've been particularly excited | about: | | 1. It is useful to be able to navigate conversations by topic | (and sub-topics etc.). AKA making the search/navigation/sense- | making activities easy. | | AND | | 2. It is useful to be able to just respond to what was seen last | in a single stream. AKA making the responding/reacting activities | easy. | | No one has gotten this quite right yet. | | Manual threading and nesting don't do this well, especially for | graph structures. The ability in some applications to respond and | reach to particular messages helps a little; but isn't coupled | with a navigation view, and you can only respond to one 'message | unit' at a time. (Though I also am not sure that the navigation | interaction needs to be an entirely separate view as shown here.) | | I expect powerful language models to dramatically change this | landscape, doing the magic for people of creating the | navigation/conversation type of interactions (e.g. automatically | inferring/suggesting "what is being responded to" for each | message, thus developing a conversational graph (which can then | be summarized and shown in a variety of ways). | | I'm curious who is innovating on this? (All I know of is | https://quill.chat). | thejarren wrote: | This is my first submission to HN, though I've been reading for | years. Please be kind, and I'd be delighted to hear your | thoughts. | holler wrote: | Thanks for sharing! I've thought about this idea as well while | building Sqwok, and it's nice to see another perspective on it | with clean visuals. I for public discovery views especially it | could be valuable. One tradeoff to consider is how much info | the user is being presented with at the same time. Multiple | live chat streams could be overwhelming, but on the other hand | done in the right way it could be very useful imo. Reposted to | Sqwok, thanks! https://sqwok.im/p/Tc-jv369HXA8Ng | treelovinhippie wrote: | Holochain is currently testing a rudimentary p2p chat app | running on a distributed network of hosts: | https://blog.holochain.org/elemental-chat-is-live/ | | That could be an interesting space for you to shape and explore | given the full p2p architecture tends to result in creative | workarounds. | ergl wrote: | Check out how Zulip does threads, it looks very similar to | this. The main view shows a chronological list of posts along | with its thread title, and you can click on one to show the | entire thread as a normal chat. Even PMs show up in the feed | interleaved with everything else. | siruva07 wrote: | Great ideas and spectacular visuals. Good luck finding a new | position! | thejarren wrote: | Thank you very much! | amackera wrote: | Great visualizations and clear writing, well done. Keep up the | writing! | Daho0n wrote: | Thank you for an interesting submission. | luplex wrote: | I'm not sure that more fragmentation would be good. Chats are | linear because conversations are linear in time. Our brains have | evolved to stay on top of linear group conversations. | | Introducing too much of an opinionated interface would discourage | tangents and off-topic banter, which I think is essential for a | healthy group. | | A different idea: delayed sending. If you want to have a | conversation, but it doesn't need to be _now_ , you can schedule | your message to send in, say, 20 minutes, or whenever there is a | pause. | | If you want to implement a functional prototype, I would | recommend hacking on top of one of the open source matrix clients | [1], the open spec has experimental support for nested chat rooms | ("spaces") [2] and threads [3]. | | [1] https://matrix.org/clients/ | | [2] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix- | doc/blob/kegan/spaces-s... | | [3] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix- | doc/blob/kegan/msc/thre... | thejarren wrote: | I think that's of valid concern. Removing users from the | immediacy of a chat into a comment section could be jarring. | Facebook seems to have bridged that gap by adding "... is | Typing" directly to comments sections, to make them feel more | alive. | | A hacked together proof of concept would be fantastic. I've | used Matrix/Element, so it's not completely unfamiliar | territory. | intrasight wrote: | Well-written article which explores an issue with which we all | struggle. | | Here's another possible but related solution. Have two views, and | have a control on the page that will swap between chronological | and thread views. In chronological view, have vertical lines | behind the messages that connect a message back to the parent | message - if it was a response. Don't indent messages - I still | want to see my messages on the right and everyone elses on the | left. In the threaded view a) reorders messages, b) moves these | lines to the left and c) indents the messages. Extra points for | animating the transition between views. | | As for the site, I know that other's likely have different | opinions, but here's mine. I had originally viewed the site with | a browser with script disabled. It still worked and was a | pleasant read. I did observe an empty panel under "The Solution". | Later I looked at it on a different machine where the browser had | script enabled and found myself annoyed with animations that | added no information. But the missing "The Solution" panel was | present. I don't know it I'm an outlier, but I find motion to be | VERY distracting when I'm reading. | | Another complaint - general but I'll highlight this article - is | the ratio of words to markup. For this article, the ratio was | about 5% - meaning that only 5% of the characters in the html | document were displayed to me the user. That is a very heavy | overhead of markup. Is that just par for the course in modern web | publishing? | kevincox wrote: | I don't think this is a great approach. The main issue I see is | that you need to decide if your message is a "chat" or a "post" | when you send it. I don't think you will get a group of people to | use it consistently, and I think it is often impossible to judge | what type of conversation your message will spawn ahead of time. | I think the better approach is to base the UI on how people | respond, rather than having the sender select from the two | interfaces up-front. | thejarren wrote: | The intent is that this would be largely automatic. Videos, | photos, gifs, links, etc., could automatically include a | "comment" function (in-place of the current reply function). | | If done manually (to a message, or group of messages) it could | be within a menu (just like today's long-tap to reply/react). | | Hope that clarifies things. I had a section showing how I | thought that could be better implemented, but I decided to save | that for Part 2. | PurpleFoxy wrote: | This feels like trying to turn IM in to Facebook. No one | wants their group to become a link dump where you drop a | video or news article and then leave. If the content isn't | discussion worthy or on topic, don't dump it. No one likes | chats which are just logs of someone's YouTube history | kevincox wrote: | I see, I missed that. In that case I have a follow up. | | Why do you think that "media" is more likely to start a | subthread than a regular message? It seems to me like this is | unlikely to be a particularly effective distinction? Or is | the intent that media + manual is close enough to perfect? | samprotas wrote: | Zulip is another interesting point in the design space IMO. I | think it's worth a look for its take on the identified problem. | | https://zulip.com/ | flaburgan wrote: | Did he just discover threaded comments? Reddit? | robto wrote: | Isn't this a slightly less general version of Zulip? I wish more | products would adopt that topic model, it works really well for | bridging the overlapping conversation puzzle. | thejarren wrote: | I hadn't heard of Zulip before today, but there are definitely | some valid overlaps. | | I agree, I think that regardless of methodology, some way to | deal with the problem is welcome. | | I want to enjoy using group chats, especially as they continue | to mature. | reikonomusha wrote: | I think the reason linear feeds remain popular is because they | emulate conversation, and nothing else. Conversation something | everybody knows how to do. Our brains know how to manage | relatively complex and disorganized discourse, some better than | others. | | The problem doesn't seem so much to be with the real time | participants of the conversation. The problem is if you _weren't | there to begin with_. Reading chat logs is probably like | attempting to read the transcript of your family holiday dinner. | It would be nonsense. You'd have no sense of time, no sense of | delay, no sense of conversational flurry, etc. As a passive | "participant" reading the conversation, you're disengaged from | the very construction that led to it at all, so in practice you | lose a sense of context or continuity. | | So these proposed solutions are asking you to do more than | communicate. They're asking you to also _organize_. And the | problem with asking users to organize in addition to communicate | is that it's easier to just not organize. | PurpleFoxy wrote: | The bigger problem with reading chat logs IMO is you either | read them backwards which is very complex but leaves you | infinite room to keep going, or you pick a point in the past | and read normally but you won't be able to continue easily once | you reach the end. | | Ultimately, how many people actually care about chat backlogs. | It's 99% useless conversations that you can just skip over and | participate in the current topic. | dasyatidprime wrote: | > Reading chat logs is probably like attempting to read the | transcript of your family holiday dinner. It would be nonsense. | You'd have no sense of time, no sense of delay, no sense of | conversational flurry, etc. | | This reminds me of a private virtual event I put on a few years | ago which was done entirely over real-time text. There were a | few people who wanted to be there, but wound up having a time | conflict, so I set up to make a recording of the event-- | including timestamps, and providing a way to play it back | correctly timed (optionally modulated by a speed control). It | seemed to get a good reception. | antihero wrote: | > And at this point, Slack's method of creating a separate | thread in response to any message is by far the most effective, | but feels clunky within the interface, as if it were an | afterthought. | | I disagree hugely. At least for casual messaging, they're far | too heavyweight for 99% of situations that are perfectly well | suited to comment replies. Our brains are fine at picking out | the context. | | For casual chat, you don't want to overstructure things. Also | with threads now you have to have some way of managing previous | contexts (do you need to scroll up to find/reply to threads? Is | there some sort of weird thread view?) | thejarren wrote: | That's definitely an interesting take, and I do agree, though | in some ways I think this approach can deal with that problem. | | Obviously the "work" asked of a user to create a post would be | a new roadblock, but if they're automatically created in most | rich-content scenarios, no additional work would be required. | | Even now, the reply feature arguably takes as much work as | writing a comment on a post, though to some degree it lacks | that immediacy. | | On the flip side, visiting a comments section tends to feel | more timeless than the conversation thread, so by automatically | creating these posts within the feed, there could be more long- | term value in each post, without drastically disrupting the | immediacy of the chat. | | I wonder if that hurdle is too large to jump, or simply a new | feature for a user to take a few days to acclimate to? | jackson1442 wrote: | Yeah, I honestly enjoy the loosely linear way that Discord's | chat works for informal conversation. You just.... chat, unless | you're replying to something a bit further up, then you mark it | as a reply. It feels completely informal without the rigidity | you get from Teams/Google Chat/Slack's independent versions of | threads. | | I feel like something like this makes sense in theory, but when | you apply it to a group you'll have people either exclusively | use the content feature or exclusively use the messaging | feature. People don't want to need to think to chat, they just | want to talk like they normally would. | kevincox wrote: | I think this is the best solution for moderately sized and | mostly-responsive groups, especially when the conversations | aren't really important. This is common with groups of | friends. | | However for larger groups and cases where you get more async | communication I find it falls apart. In this case I like | Zulip's approach of forcing every conversation to be a thread | more. But honestly my favourite is still email's tree of | comments (or Reddit sorted oldest-to-newest). It makes it | easy to follow a threads and mute threads or subthreads. Few | other systems deal so gracefully with tangential | conversations which I find to be very common. Of course email | has it's flaws, but for async discussion between a large | number of people I find the ability to see the reply-tree to | be the most effective. | thejarren wrote: | Agreed. I like the tree of threaded comments like Reddit/HN | much more. Theoretically the comments in posts could use | that structure. | EccentricBunny wrote: | I think the reason chat applications like Discord or Slack are | usually clusterfuck is because the people using them are not used | to have an organized conversation. They are used to talk about | everything without thinking about it too much. | | IRC has also the same model and people usually stay on topic, | because that's what they are used to, it's on their culture. The | same goes for other forms of communication, if it is old enough | to survive, it'll have a culture around them and newcomers will | have to adapt to the old ones if they want to be part of the | community. Doesn't matter if we reinvent the wheel once again, if | you can't discuss about something staying on topic the chat room | is going to become a mess in a couple of minutes if there are | more than 10 persons involved. You can have 50 different rooms | for different topics but people go where there are other people | talking (nobody wants to talk in an empty room), you need to | moderate those rooms but at one point you can be there 24 hours a | day if you had just created your chat group for fun. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-03-09 23:01 UTC)