Group chats rule the world

Role of Group Chats vs Public Social Media

• Many commenters agree group chats now fulfill functions once served by public platforms (Twitter, forums, blogs).
• Reasons cited: harassment and context collapse in public, “culture war” fatigue, enshittification/ads, and desire for “human‑scale” spaces with understandable norms.
• Some push back that this isn’t “recent”: private chats, forums, and closed groups have existed for decades; the “all‑public” phase was the anomaly.

Social Dynamics, Rituals, and Annoyances

• Some value rituals like “good morning” messages, welcomes, and weekly memes as signals of presence and belonging.
• Others strongly dislike these as fake, noisy, and notification spam; they prefer chat for coordination and substantive sharing only.
• Group chats are often described as “forever dinner parties” among people who mostly know each other offline; others find them shallow, groupthinky, or draining.

Group Size, Quality, and Moderation

• Several stories: once groups pass a certain size (dozens → hundreds → thousands), quality plummets, spam and sales pitches dominate, and high‑value members leave.
• Proposed mitigations: strict moderation (including bans), topic channels, “slowmode” rate limiting with community overrides, and invite‑only or karma‑gated access.
• Others note that fragmentation into subgroups and side‑channels is inevitable; many subgroups can signal cliques and declining “group health.”

Privacy, Security, and Platforms

• Debate over Telegram, which is criticized for non‑default or missing E2E encryption in groups; some say non‑E2E DM systems normalize surveillance.
• Counterargument: large public group chats are effectively public; E2E mainly matters for parallel private DMs.
• People mention using Signal, Slack, Discord, WhatsApp, IRC; Discord often associated with younger users; some nostalgia for IRC and MSN.

Exclusivity, Gatekeeping, and Power

• Group chats are framed as modern salons, but several see them as exclusionary “cool tables” or “gatekeepers rule the world.”
• Concerns: influencer cabals coordinating manipulation, VC/crypto/AI chats optimizing how to “sell you stuff,” and private spaces marketed as “authenticity” or “exclusivity as a service.”
• Others emphasize that small, trust‑based groups (often with offline ties) can be genuinely supportive and long‑lived, though always vulnerable to commercialization and “phonies.”