Look, maybe I’m gonna sound like the adult in the room who says the party’s over, or even the get off my lawn grandpa, but here goes.

Real time is mostly a gimmick. It’s in the same category as video games and entertainment. A lot goes into making it performant and scalable but for getting things done in life it’s a net negative.

1. Those realtime notifications that interrupt your family time and dates, because the people on the other side have unreasonable expectations of immediacy

2. That 200th person today who entered your chat and said “Hey everyone!” adding zero new information.

3. The 30th time someone asked a basic question that was already addressed and could have been easily found in an FAQ or database or threaded view

4. The literally 27,503 messages you missed (many including “hi” etc.) that may as well have not been written at all as far as you’re concerned because you’re not going to scroll and even see them

5. By the time someone comes who can answer your question, it could have scrolled off the screen, but if you’re lucky they might go back in history, find it and tag you

5a. Chat is totally unstructured. So many people make plans via chat, it’s ridiculous. A marketplace or event list should not be negotiated via chat any more than chess games should all be blindfold chess with only the list of moves and having everyone reconstruct the position in their mind.

6. There is no goal, chat can go on endlessly, like those 9273837 comments about some publicly shared meme on facebook of which 2/3 say the same thing. Combine that with an algorithm that prioritizes “engagement” (ie ad revenue for the social network) and we wonder why our political discourse is beoken. We even began to create https://rational.app to fix political discourse.

7. It’s bad for OPSEC and anonymity also. People have been busted as an online pseudonym by cutting their wifi and watching the person go offline. How nice are those “presence” indicators eh? It was a huge undertaking at Facebook just so you could casually know when someone was online and ignoring you.

8. The fact is, that people will cut corners creating content if you let them. And on average there are far more readers of the content than writers. Making people slow down and write paragraphs and edit their thoughts before hitting Return is better than making them write one line spastically

because its so farsi call
far sickle
I mean farcical! Stupid autocomplete
Haha LOL
Lmao smiley face yea
hehe

Chat is slightly better than endless facetime or real life meetings which people often loathe.

Now consider threaded discussions, tagging, and so on. The conversation is a tree. Each thread can have its own governance, and can be easily hosted by whoever started it. Things can be combined into an FAQ, in fact that’s how Stackoverflow works. And that will make every answer better, and every question has a better chance of being answered.

We are ON SUCH A SITE RIGHT NOW. Any part of the tree can be collapsed, or expanded. It’s easy to navigate. It can be represented in many other ways too.

You know what it doesn’t have? All of the above things. It doesn’t even ping you when someone replied to your message, which is the most addictive — err, sorry, “engaging” - thing of all.

Now go to your Telegram and look at those channels you’re in with 30,000 members. How many missed messages do you see? 7,000? Go ahead come in and interact with 0.1% of the channel that happens to be there the time. You said hi? You asked a question and no one around had any expertise? You left for and hour and came back to see another 500 messages, wasting time trying to scroll back to where you were? Yeah. That was realtime chat. Just like Facebook Likes and Cryptokitties, it is a gimmick that has benefitted almost no one.