[HN Gopher] We don't show typing status
___________________________________________________________________
We don't show typing status
Author : commondream
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-06-01 19:55 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.withcardinal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.withcardinal.com)
| jaimehrubiks wrote:
| MS Teams has the worst ever "typing status" implementation I've
| ever seen. In certain cases it shows you're typing by just having
| the conversation opened, which is extremely frustrating. Maybe
| just because the cursor is in the text box. It should only show
| typing if I have at least 1 letter...
| gabereiser wrote:
| And a timeout of at most 3 seconds in case you pause typing.
| fleddr wrote:
| Typing status aside, there's nothing worse than a semi-realtime
| conversation.
|
| A true realtime conversation, rapid chat replies, is fine and
| sometimes needed when something important is happening.
|
| A true async conversation that is slow and may take days, is also
| fine.
|
| A semi-realtime conversation though is the horror. A "realtime"
| conversation where for some reason the other party takes 2
| minutes to type any response, every single message. The 2 minutes
| is enough of a wait to get enraged but too short to go do
| something else.
|
| My solution: call the person unannounced. Just say: "I figured
| it'd be quicker to talk directly". This forces them to drop
| whatever the hell else they were doing and get to the damn point.
|
| Intrusive? No. Not if you let me wait a full hour for what should
| be a 5 minute interaction.
| sugarpile wrote:
| Sounds like a great way to get those two minutes to turn into
| two hours from here on out and all your calls "accidentally
| missed."
| jacquesm wrote:
| Some people are not that fast in either thinking or typing or
| are careful in their responses, or struggle with the language,
| some people are not comfortable talking on the phone.
|
| Some are both...
|
| I know at least one such person and I would not miss them for
| the world.
| franga2000 wrote:
| I agree that it's frustrating, but your "solution" is extremely
| self-centered. I might not be getting much out of the
| conversation or even want to be a part of it in the forst
| place. In that case, if responding slowly works better for me,
| you forcing me to give you my attention adds a huge cost to my
| side of the equation.
|
| To use an example: if you're texting me to help you fix your
| printer while I'm working, I might give you a small bit of my
| attention out of "generosity" (not the right term but close
| enough). I'm not getting anything out of this, but I'm not
| losing much either. But if you want to completely interrupt my
| flow and force me to give you all or none of my attention, fuck
| your printer. I have better things to do.
| [deleted]
| wolverine876 wrote:
| You can always say, 'let me call you after work ...'.
| [deleted]
| idiotsecant wrote:
| a 2 minute delay is asynchronous. You should be devoting 2% of
| your attention to keeping up the thread, and put the rest on
| other tasks, like everyone else does. What you're describing -
| turning a casual, asynchronous conversation into a demand for
| full attention and relying on the open 'channel' of the chat to
| somewhat force consent is an annoying move and would get you
| put solidly into the 'respond in a few hours when I'm done with
| everything else' pile.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > You should be devoting 2% of your attention to keeping up
| the thread, and put the rest on other tasks, like everyone
| else does.
|
| As I understand, and IME, that's not how attention works.
| Switching has a large negative effect on focus for me, and
| when I'm interacting with others who try to do it, it sure
| seems like it doesn't work for them. I focus on one thing at
| a time.
| TrevorJ wrote:
| As an aside, I'd love a chat app that sends each character as it
| is typed, simply for the pure chaos of it.
| karaterobot wrote:
| This is how it was for a lot of "SysOp chat" systems in the BBS
| days. Sometimes the two parties wren't even in separate
| sections of the chat, they were effectively just having a
| discussion in a shared text document.
| reidjs wrote:
| See google docs
| sidibe wrote:
| Google Wave
| BHSPitMonkey wrote:
| Google Docs
| woodruffw wrote:
| Try talk[1] some time -- it's a live connection to the other
| user's TTY, so they see everything you type, typos and all. You
| can't even type simultaneously, since the messages would
| intermingle; you need to wait for the other person to signal
| that they're finished.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I always preferred ytalk, then your own window to type in.
| (The screen was split in an upper and lower half and you had
| one or the other.)
| wruza wrote:
| I remember doing that with modem connections in dos, you could
| chat with a friend while up/downloading (or with a bbs sysop).
| There was even a sequence that beeped on the other side to draw
| peer's attention, but I've never used it. With friends we had a
| rule to not interrupt the one who writes until a newline,
| because characters would mix as in "Hi, how aHrie you".
| c22 wrote:
| ICQ had this mode too.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I _loved_ this in Google Wave! It felt closer to an IRL
| conversation, because I could start thinking about my response
| while the other person was typing.
|
| I can understand why it made people uncomfortable--there is a
| certain intimacy to it. But, a bit of vulnerability is good for
| conversation.
| gjvc wrote:
| Google Wave ftw
| news_to_me wrote:
| https://brutal.chat/
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| zulip allows configuring both your "typing" indicator and online
| status indication.
|
| Twist takes it one step further and has no online indicator at
| all; twist is a somewhat different paradigm though.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I've never heard of Cardinal but I liked the fact you could
| actually see what people were typing, character by character, in
| ytalk. Sped up a lot of conversations.
| Aloha wrote:
| I came here to say this, I would love a service like this.
| geoffjentry wrote:
| I found it often the opposite with ytalk. Yes, some people
| would just plow through it and make the best of things. And one
| could already be thinking about a response in real time.
|
| But other people would find the need to correct every typo. And
| it was painful as crap watching someone with a 5 WPM typing
| speed and an affinity for typos to get through what they were
| trying to say. And eventually you move past thinking about a
| response in real time to screaming "JUST STOP TYPING
| ALREADY!!!!"
| dilap wrote:
| that's interesting.
|
| i've never used chat that does this, but i have seen a lot of
| claims it was a misfeature in google wave back in the day.
|
| but still, i could see it being ok, more like verbal
| conversation.
|
| i defnly agree w/ the linked article that the middle ground of
| "<soandso> is typing" is a misfeature. the only possible
| response to that information is to sit there waiting, which is
| annoying/pointless.
|
| (but nothing beats verbal comms, still. downside of course is
| that it is "extremely synchronous" and does not archive well.)
| dbbk wrote:
| This sounds, and looks, just the same as Twist
| joshstrange wrote:
| On the flip side I greatly prefer the indicator. It lets me know
| if I should wait for a response or move on to other things. When
| I message someone I wait a few seconds to see if they start
| typing and if they do I just wait and if not I can start focusing
| on something different.
| layer8 wrote:
| Often enough people start typing but then decide to not respond
| after all (or not right away), so you end up waiting for
| nothing.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Or they're fat-fingered like me and accidentally click a
| character while trying to close the message app.
| walrus01 wrote:
| i'll take it one further and say that having a messenger app that
| shows "online" or "active" status is not something I like. In
| addition to the problems with having an app that sends an
| indicator to the other party that somebody is actively typing.
|
| I like how Signal just shows that the person exists as a contact.
| Whether they're awake or not, or active, or idle is opaque to me
| and I'm totally fine with that.
|
| One of the _reasons_ for text based chat /messenger apps, going
| all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in
| having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an
| immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on
| something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead.
|
| In things like facebook messenger I bet that 99% of users never
| dig into the settings to turn OFF the "show your activity status
| to other people" option.
|
| For something like a work place communication tools such as Slack
| I can understand the purpose of setting yourself active or idle
| manually to indicate whether you're available for messages, or in
| a different time zone, or whatever. That's a different use case.
| jrockway wrote:
| Yeah, I would never add presence to a chat app. I hate, hate,
| hate it.
|
| I started using Discord a few years ago and accumulated friends
| with whom I regularly chat. If I leave Discord off, they're
| like "oh you haven't been online in such a long time, I thought
| you were dead". Or if I chat while I have the thing set to idle
| they're like "oh lying about your idle status because I'm
| annoying you" and things like that.
|
| It is such a chore to maintain people's expectations. I wish
| they never added this feature to the app, because my friends
| will guilt me into turning it back on if I turn it off.
|
| Slack is similarly bad. Like if someone wants to step out of
| work to go for a walk in the middle of the day, I don't need to
| know about it. It's none of my business. They can reply to my
| messages when they have time.
| Mandatum wrote:
| The solution here is to login, set yourself to away/invisible
| and never make it active.
|
| The activity sign is useful for most people.
| sroussey wrote:
| I never had a phone number for anyone I chatted with on IRC.
| Same with ICQ.
| hbn wrote:
| I don't even like read receipts for casual communication apps.
| I feel like they only cause stress. I don't want people to know
| if I'm read something because I may have read it but be too
| busy to respond and need to come back to it later, but I don't
| want the person thinking I'm ignoring them. And on the other
| side of things, I don't want to stress myself out repeatedly
| checking if someone read my message.
| cgriswald wrote:
| > One of the reasons for text based chat/messenger apps, going
| all the way back to the earliest days of IRC, is the benefit in
| having asynchronous communications. If I absolutely need an
| immediate answer from someone or a realtime 1:1 conversation on
| something urgent I'll call them on the phone instead.
|
| This is lost on, as far as I can tell, at least 50% of the
| people I regularly text, despite me explicitly pointing this
| out to them.
|
| In the years before email and texting and even ubiquitous
| answering machines, when phone calls were all you had, there
| were people who _could not_ let the phone ring without picking
| it up. I see people respond this way to text messages now. They
| not only have to pick up the phone to read the message
| immediately, but they have to engage with the conversation
| immediately as well. (And not just for work messages.)
|
| I don't know how people live that way...
| walrus01 wrote:
| > I don't know how people live that way...
|
| Based on what I've observed, in a state of constant low level
| anxiety interconnected with certain weird societal
| expectations of activity/behavior on popular social media
| (facebook/instagram/twitter/snapchat/tiktok/etc)
| nine_k wrote:
| I see situations when broadcasting my availability to some of
| my contacts is important.
|
| I see cases when doing so is counterproductive or
| uncomfortable.
|
| An obvious solution, of course, is to make it an option.
| Default hidden with per-contact overrides, or the other way
| around.
|
| Of course, XMPP has a better part of it implemented, but not
| all of it, and without a sleek UI. When Jabber still was
| popular enough, I could subscribe to (or unsubscribe from)
| status change events, per contact, using Pidgin. Worked pretty
| well.
| zwkrt wrote:
| As I understand it, all of these features are not features that
| people really like, they are features that 'drive engagement'
| in that horrible UX A/B testing sort of way. The basic tenet is
| that if you can increase the anxiety of the user they will
| spend more time checking the app. If I am messaging someone and
| see some blinking dots, I will stay in the app until they
| message back. Otherwise I might use the messaging app as an
| asynchronous tool and not waste all of my time in it.
| mattbee wrote:
| > I like how Signal just shows that the person exists as a
| contact. Whether they're awake or not, or active, or idle is
| opaque to me and I'm totally fine with that.
|
| Signal does show whether the recipient is typing, if you have
| the chat open.
| ytjohn wrote:
| I remember IRC a bit differently - mostly with it being tied to
| dialup. When we were on irc, we were on. We might be "afk" for
| a bit, but generally would be back soon. If you saw someone's
| nick on irc, it was very likely that they were online and
| active. Even with ICQ and AOL, it was pretty apparent if people
| were online or not. If they weren't online, or you didn't need
| a quick response you sent them an email.
|
| As DSL and broadband became more popular, chat moved to being
| more asynchronous. Chat clients started synchronizing message
| history with the server to make it avaialble on all your
| devices. It was easier to leave your presence online, even when
| you were unreachable.
|
| IRC itself still retains a lot of that realtime chat, mainly
| because of its transient nature. Yes - the channel might be
| populated with people that aren't actually there, but the
| conversation is much more real time. Unless you have a bouncer
| or web client, the chat history starts when you join the
| channel and ends when you leave. There's no threading (ok,
| maybe some of the web-based clients will do that), so even if
| you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't
| participate in it. At best you can start a new conversation
| referencing the old one. Not everyone in the channel will have
| that history.
|
| I consider that lack of permanence a feature. When Google Talk
| came out, I loved the fact that all my chat history was saved
| and it was available everywhere. Now that all chat clients have
| that, I find myself preferring the more ephemeral/transient
| chats.
| walrus01 wrote:
| from the POV of people using irc from dialup it was indeed
| very much like that - but also from those who were dialing up
| to unix systems, or using them locally over a network such as
| at a university, the machine running the irc client
| maintained a persistent network connection so it was possible
| to run a persistent client (or eggdrop bot) without
| disconnecting/reconnecting and re-entering channels.
|
| after about the year 2000 or so it was also really common to
| see people with shell accounts various places using gnu
| screen to maintain a persistent irc client session.
| easton wrote:
| It's interesting, because I remember Steve or somebody saying
| this was a selling point of iMessage. "No busy indicator, no
| offline state, just send your message and they'll get it on all
| of their devices". Then at the last WWDC they go up there and
| show how cool it is that iMessage will now tell your contacts
| if you are in Do Not Disturb (and allow them to override it).
| You can opt out, of course, but I guess people really like the
| busy indicator?
| gjvc wrote:
| > "No busy indicator, no offline state, just send your
| message and they'll get it on all of their devices".
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wfG8ngFvPk
| powersnail wrote:
| > I guess people really like the busy indicator?
|
| I think people sometimes just really don't want others to
| think that they are ghosting them, so a busy indicator serves
| that purpose: "I'm working right now, not purposefully
| ignoring you, please be patient, or override it if it's
| urgent."
|
| I don't personally use it, but I understand the sentiment.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Huh. I've always assumed chat apps were for synchronous
| communication. If they are for asynchronous, then why do they
| exist? Email already solves asynchronous communication pretty
| well, and it is even decentralized.
| tshaddox wrote:
| From a technical standpoint I don't see how there's much of a
| difference, given that devices are almost always connected to
| the Internet and almost all chat, messaging, and email
| services people use have a third party server that persists a
| message regardless of the recipient's "presence" at the time
| the message is sent. These services _have_ converged, apart
| from a few idiosyncrasies and perhaps some waning differences
| in the social expectations of a particular service.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > In most discussion apps that show your typing status, you feel
| pressure to wait for your peers to finish typing and sending a
| message before typing one yourself.
|
| > wait for those above them to speak up first
|
| Do others think of these as universal rules? Common? Situational?
| Non-existent?
|
| Reading the OP, I fear I don't know the rules at all. I've
| participated in online forums in every medium and for a long
| time, and never thought about these. Maybe I've been disruptive
| or rude without realizing it. :(
| atto wrote:
| If you're stuck using Slack and don't like their behavior of
| sharing typing status, I made a browser extension years ago that
| blocks that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/slack-
| hide-typing/...
| kazinator wrote:
| Have you ever used the BSD ntalk program? You can see every
| keystroke of the other party, in the opposite split of the
| screen.
|
| It's awesome: people complete each other's sentences, or stop
| typing when the other person is saying the same obvious thing.
|
| You can say " , ... what's that word again ...?" and the other
| person will help, then you can backspace over that and continue
| your sentence.
|
| I've not ntalked in probably over 25 years. Sheesh!
| grokblah wrote:
| I miss chatting with that! It was so interactive. I wonder if
| it could be translated to communication between more than two
| parties. It sure would be interesting to see a prototype of
| something like that.
| kazinator wrote:
| That's Ytalk; also ancient, and uses the same protocol.
|
| https://linux.die.net/man/1/ytalk
|
| I seem to recall seeing people use that around the
| undergraduate CS lab.
|
| I should have mentioned that what was new (to me) when I
| was introduced to talk/ntalk was the concurrency of the
| split screen: both parties just clacking away at the same
| time
|
| As a user of dial-up BBSes, I had often chatted 1:1 with
| sysops, nor as a sysop with users. The BBS sysop chat
| implementations were different/simpler; both parties were
| typing into the same space. This required manners: taking
| turns, letting the other people finish their sentence.
| That's the same like a Windows user being remotely assisted
| today: you and the remote admin can both move the mouse
| cursor or type into the same edit boxes.
| karolzlot wrote:
| I can't find pricing of Cardinal. Do they have free tier?
| avgcorrection wrote:
| > Inclusive By Default
|
| > We all tend to operate within explicit and implicit hierarchies
| within our teams. Explicitly we know we have a manager we should
| defer to, and that there are executives and other roles that are
| important to the team. Implicitly we know there are people with
| more experience in particular topics or simply more social
| capital within the team. If you see someone above you in either
| of those hierarchies, you're more likely to pause and listen, and
| potentially to decide it's not worth the effort to bring your
| ideas forward.
|
| > Our goal by removing typing indicators is to help teams build
| environments where anyone can think through an idea and bring it
| forward without having to wait for those above them to speak up
| first. We want everyone to feel included in discussions when they
| have an important idea to bring to the table.
|
| We make a chat app for teams with a clear chain of command (I
| don't know just going by context). By removing this one super-
| modern chat app quirk we will be able to say that we are
| "inclusive by default", even though the whole context that your
| team operates in contradicts our stated aim.
|
| I don't know I just think that the hierarchy of the group trumps
| such trivialities.
| [deleted]
| kibwen wrote:
| Typing status is one of the worst UX misfeatures ever devised,
| and any app that includes them automatically comes across as
| amateurish, as though the project manager was just ticking boxes
| rather than actually bothering to consider the experience of
| using the app. I applaud any attempt to put more nails in this
| coffin.
| seydor wrote:
| Too much marketing fluff around a minor resource optimization
| HappyTypist wrote:
| Things I wish messaging apps had:
|
| 1. Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the
| best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be
| easy and feature minimal friction.
|
| 2. Auto-deleting of messages in a DM after X _messages_ (e.g.
| only the last 100 messages are retained as scrollback). It forces
| you to document knowledge in more suitable forms; than having it
| lost in DM silos. Furthermore, it keeps conversations with your
| regular contacts more candid and natural; but retains the
| information and context for infrequent contacts.
|
| 3. No typing status (thanks Cardinal!)
| commondream wrote:
| > Forward a message to someone else. Sometimes you're not the
| best person to answer, but a colleague is. Forwarding should be
| easy and feature minimal friction.
|
| Cardinal does this! You just share with someone else and you
| can expand or change the discussion as needed.
| mynameishere wrote:
| Sometimes I will type a few random characters as an ack, and to
| let the person know that I am going to respond.
| izzydata wrote:
| Perhaps it should be more obvious to everyone if the particular
| form of communication you are using is meant to be synchronous or
| asynchronous. Talking on the phone is clearly synchronous and
| sending emails is clearly asynchronous. However everything else
| seems to have gotten confusing. People have started moving what
| was traditionally forum based long term asynchronous
| communication to Discord.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Yeah, this distinction is also melded with a persistent/live
| distinction. I know in reddit/hn/forum I can go back at the end
| of the day and read everything I missed, so it's 'obviously'
| asynchronous. Mentally, I don't feel the same way about slack,
| because it's hard to continue a conversation that happened
| earlier.. I guess threads could make this easier.
| jrockway wrote:
| Reddit actually has typing indicators now. "2 people are
| typing" it says when you make a top level comment.
|
| (They removed a bunch of features from "Old Reddit" that I
| liked, so I gave in and use "New Reddit" now. Sigh.)
| indymike wrote:
| Slack threads are not fun.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Non-disableable typing indicators is one of the few things I very
| much dislike about Slack. I don't want people to see whether I'm
| typing, and this means I have to use an external editor. (The big
| other thing is @here/@channel notifications by default being on.
| No fucking thanks -- I turn that shit off on almost every
| channel.)
| sys_64738 wrote:
| This ^ - being forced to use an external editor to type you
| response then copy/paste defeats the purpose. Plus Slack is
| such a POS anyway. I also hate the distraction of the crap
| notifications. Humans are not interrupt-driven creatures.
| Firmwarrior wrote:
| so long as we're dogpiling Slack, let me add in my complaint:
| You can't mute Slackbot, and Slackbot sends a LOT of dumb and
| pointless messages about channel management. At work they're
| constantly adding thousands of people to "watch party" or
| other random channels, then archiving those channels later
| on, and I keep getting notifications from Slackbot about
| them.
|
| I was trying to keep Slack notifications unmuted in case my
| manager needs something from me, but I was just getting too
| much useless crap from Slackbot. Finally I had to mute it
| completely and tell him to call my cell if anything comes up
| wruza wrote:
| What's wrong with someone seeing that you are typing?
|
| Seriously.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I think its interesting that this article isn't about _your
| opinion_ on typing status, its about the user story they are
| building that messenger for. Yet most of the comments are about
| an opinion on typing status in general. So... what do people
| think about the cardinal messenger and their exclusion of typing
| status?
| gog wrote:
| I guess not enough people are using Cardinal for a meaningful
| discussion on that specifically.
| samtimalsina wrote:
| Never heard of Cardinal either, and I like that they don't show
| typing status. If I see someone is typing in a Slack channel, or
| typing to me privately, it takes all my focus away until it is
| complete. Interesting though that they don't show their pricing
| on the website. Why's that?
| barkingcat wrote:
| that means a person can DOS you by typing and erasing text but
| never sending you a message?
| samtimalsina wrote:
| People do that?
| layer8 wrote:
| Happens often enough that people start responding but then
| realize they don't actually have anything useful to say
| right now ("never mind").
| das_keyboard wrote:
| Just typing something and then not sending a message puts me
| out of order for about 5 minutes while I'm waiting if there
| is a message coming. And then another 10 minutes while I'm
| speculating what he could have wanted from me.
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