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Compare to life on the air, where each post is a performance informed by the user’s specific and invisible perspective on a platform they don’t fully understand.
The blessing and curse of chat has always been that it’s hard to make money from talking – it feels like an outage, much more than an ad in a stream. This relegated our most important and satisfying conversations to features (AOL, Gmail, Facebook, the game of your choice) stuck within the wider context of subsidies, leaving the rest of the market to specialize (Campfire, Slack, Signal) or fight for leftovers. These services, many of which are incompatible, come and go, leaving our collective back channel in an ever-changing state of fragmentation and turmoil. Developing on conversation is also difficult. Services may work better than others or may have a few more features. But the best chat service, as always, is the one you don’t have to think about using.
We were chatting before broadcasts took over, and we’ll still chat when they’re gone. Meanwhile, making your internet experience more enjoyable can be as simple as posting less and chatting more.
New visions for online socializing chat with a more central role. Younger readers and especially gamers may be familiar conflictIt’s an app where a quarter of a billion people hang out on their own created servers, ranging from a few to thousands, split into channels as needed. (It is particularly popular for the voice chat feature that players use when playing together.)
Making more or less sense to an IRC user from 1988, Discord can be understood as an attempt to create a social media that is ultimately chatter-subjected. It is becoming more and more common to see online communities, fandoms, and entire websites redirect users to a connected Discord server; Reddit may be where many new online groups start, but subreddit Disputes is often where the real energy is. The cryptocurrency and NFT worlds in particular have given their decentralized efforts a perception location and membership.
That’s not the only way the conversation can feel like it’s coming. Two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg navigated virtual environments The next thing to talk about is how the internet will enable us to interact intimately from all over the world in ways that feel immersive, direct and personal rather than alienating and awkward. His speech was futuristic, but the description of this idealized new world sounded very familiar. Spiritually, metadata store not sending. This is chat.
For Context is a column that explores the limits of digital culture.
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