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There's something about read indicators that always gets under my skin, and I'm not entirely why. Partly it's because it works against the idea that chat messages should be treated asynchronously, but It also feels kind of invasive? Like my device is tell on me for being indecisive or anxious about responding. Maybe I'm just weird but I've alway been curious how others feel about that. The snapchat style "currently viewing" indicator makes that even worse.

That said, the timeline and quick switching ideas are very cool. So many chat apps implement a text search and stop there, this is a clever way to find a specific point in time, or find specific non-text content.

2 comments

Chat isn’t asynchronous. It’s semi-synchronous. It’s hard to have a conversation with someone who is not entirely “there”, and so read indicators give you some hints as to their current level of presence.

Before everyone seemed to migrate to txt messages and iMessage style apps like WhatsApp the only chat app that had a pounce feature for someone offline was ICQ. The paradise of messaging mail was incorporated with chats and thus a common saved history retrieved from a server was normalized. Chat from the IRC days was seen as more of a p2p application with a relay in between. If a user node didn’t exist the user object couldn’t receive messages

That's very true, asynchronous isn't a fair way to describe things.

But given a hint about their level of presence, what are you doing with that information? What can you do after sending the message you were already going to send? Worst case it makes people send "???" as a follow up because they can see I'm coherent enough to tap a notification and assume that means I'm available for a full conversation. The opposite example is the typing indicator, which acts as a useful mechanism to keep a conversation ordered and flowing once it's started. Maybe an argument could be made for the "currently viewing" indicator being more useful, since it solves the problem of indicating I'm available for a conversation better than just "read y/n".

1. Dismiss the notification instead of opening it.

2. Before read receipts, I used to get very anxious about whether I was being ignored, now I can see that the other person simply hasn’t seen the message. Was that a personal problem? Yes, and frankly it probably would be significantly less of an issue now that I’m older.

receipts are nice. they add presence. there are a very narrow set of reasons you'd want to disable receipts; most people will happily admit they've disabled receipts so it's easier to avoid people. i sure have

I find there’s a very narrow set of reasons to enable receipts. I don’t like it when products snitch on me for viewing something, or for being currently active.