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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   3684 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has anyone solved chat notifications yet?

Especially in small-medium group chats, I often do want to keep apprised of new messages in real time, but don't want to be notified of every trivial thing. I'll hear a whatsapp/discord chirp, only to check it, find an animated gif and think You made me task switch for THIS? grr.. Switch back to whatever I'm doing. Blerp! New message! Check the chat: "ikr? lol". Oh my god SHUT UP! <Mute notifications for 8 hours>.

8 hours later: Blerp!. Check chat. Find I've missed a whole real conversation.

There's gotta be a better way, right? Exponential backoff algorithm? AI parsing to determine importance? No more than N notifications per alert window + summary?

The best way is to overcome your FOMO and treat Discord as ephemeral. Back when we used IRC we had no chat history. So repeat after me: anything that happens when you're not actively participating doesn't count. Just mark everything as read.

Back then when I've been using IRC I've been running a log server with back history and notifications for my name. And people I conversed with (admittedly, as geeky and more geeky than myself) did so too.

IRC had /log and there were bots who recorded channels. Some are public, for Freenode before it died. I still have logs from decades ago.

Discord has an experimental chat summarization feature using LLMs that keeps you abreast of lengthy threads if you join in later.

I think eventually we'll have an equivalent on other chat apps, especially one capable of notifying you only when something of note happens. Sadly I don't think anything actually exists along those lines right now.

Hmm you could build this today. AI categorization for every chat message. Opt out of notifications for jokes and low-effort.

Keyword notification. Only some people or some topics, or combination, are worth my attention.

I think the standard advice is to make separate on-topic/important and off-topic/casual channels.

This doesn't work very well in my experience. Even when such channels exist, conversation naturally drifts from unserious to serious, from topic to topic, and no one wants to stop and move elsewhere. That kills the vibe, breaks the scroll history. Also, no one wants to be the one to pipe up and ask people to move either.

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