Chats and forums

This summer, I was invited to join a new community for people who write and was very happy to join. I was part of the “original group” if that makes sense in a steadily growing community. The group started as Signal group and for a while, it was lovely to be part of it.

Then we grew to around 40 people. All lovely people whose writing I had been following for years and who I loved chatting with. I was busy with other stuff for a few days and when I returned to Signal, I saw almost 200 unread messages spanning half a dozen interesting discussions.

That’s when it hit me. Not the amount of unread messages but the ephemerality of the discussion. Over the past few years, I have intentionally changed my habits. I have left (or significantly decreased usage of) social media platforms like X, Instagram and LinkedIn because I got annoyed at the algorithms pushing content and everything being “send and forget” type stuff.

I have instead focused more on reading and writing blogs, participating in forums and doing my social media in Mastodon. Like a frog in a slowly boiling pot, I hadn’t noticed the effect of the change until the Signal thing hit me.

In Build the forum you want to see in the web, I wrote about how instead of complaining, we should make these things happen and I haven’t been at my best in following my own advice, I’ll admit that.

There are a couple of specific things I think a forum can do way better than a single-threaded chat like Signal group and I wanted to explore and expand on those ideas more in this blog post.

Multiple different simultaneous discussions

The first is that in a single-thread chat, it’s difficult to keep up with multiple discussions because every message is in the same feed. If two people were discussing thing A and then two different people start to discuss about B, it becomes difficult to see which messages are about which topic.

It sometimes makes me not reply to something that already passed because I feel now rude interrupting the on-going discussion.

Administrative discussions also happen in the same feed but they are often more time pressing and in a way more important for people to notice and discuss and take action on which can halt all the other discussion because you don’t want to push the current important, feed dominating messages out of view.

In our community, we have already started some longer term projects but in a single-thread discussion that requires so much more effort from people to drive them because every time there’s some new progress or desire to get people to participate, you need to rehash everything that has been decided, discussed or done in the past if you want everyone to have a good picture of the situation.

Discussions fade way too quickly

The biggest thing I think we lose in a fast paced chat discussion is how short a lifespan of a topic or discussion becomes. Unless the topic is super hot in the group and maintains active discussion for a day, it is lost in the history within hours.

When I returned to my group with almost 200 unread messages, a good amount of discussions had started and then faded into the void. Sure, I could scroll back, find a message, reply to it and try to restart the discussion that happened while I was gone but it would be difficult for everyone to follow because the context and previous discussion is somewhere in the past, spread out and interwoven with all the other discussions.

What we lose is the build up on ideas. Imagine instead of a discussion on an interesting topic lasting for a couple of hours and containing everyone’s first thought, it would grow up over the years.

If the previous ideas are all in one place, easy to read at one’s own leisure and mulled over, there’s a larger likelihood that those ideas will bounce on each other and grow together into something more profound.

When someone then replies to a forum thread, even if it’s months old, other people can immediately catch up with all the previous discussion. I like that idea.

As I’ve been working more and more on my own notes, I’ve discovered a lot of new joy in the ability to think slowly, return to ideas and accumulate knowledge over longer periods of time rather than starting over from the scratch every time. That’s how I see forums compared to chats.

New people joining old discussions

To build on the previous idea, this becomes even bigger deal when new people join the community. Whether they can see the old chat history or not, it’s unlikely that people would scan through thousands of messages in unorganised never-ending feed to find and participate in discussions.

With a forum style platform, they could immediately skim through the threads by their titles and see which topics they have something to contribute on right away and have the rest in their mind to help new ideas form and knowing there’s a place for them in the platform.

More time, more thought, more meaningful discussion

I wish I had discovered these thoughts way earlier in life but I guess better late than never. I am glad that I have finally found ways that help me think more deeply and process thoughts and new knowledge better by giving it more time, more thought and participating in more discussions that are not just passing small talk that’s forgotten the moment silence takes its space in between thoughts.

I have now done it a lot on my own: through reading, working on my notes and writing. Going forward, I want to take even more action to foster that in the communities I’m part of.