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Comment by aimazon | Hacker News Reader

Most people have a few friends and they’re in the same place. “My people” are in the same place today that they were in yesterday and will be again tomorrow. Most people prefer the inefficient and imperfect group chat because it’s personal. Most people can’t imagine anything worse than bringing more technology into their personal relationships. I’m sure this app is great for the small number of us that are fortunate enough to live like ev, without a care in the world, vibing our way around the world… partying with tenacious founders hungry for an exited-founder’s co-sign, but that’s, what, a few thousand people? That’s not social, it’s niche.

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>Most people prefer the inefficient and imperfect group chat because it’s personal.

It's small-scale, has high barriers to entry, and entirely user-directed. In other words, the exact opposite of what makes money in profit-driven social networking. And that's exactly why group chats are so great.

> Most people prefer the inefficient and imperfect group chat because it’s personal. Most people can’t imagine anything worse than bringing more technology into their personal relationships.

Group chat has been a thing since the late 90s and remains superior in my mind as well. It often seems like the real problem some of these apps are trying to solve is that there's no good way to monetize group chat.

> “My people” are in the same place today that they were in yesterday and will be again tomorrow.

"My people" are people who once were in that sort of temporal and geographic bubble, but are not necessarily local top me any more.

Some of the most important people in my life are spread around the globe, and we only get together in person once a year or maybe even once a decade (more of those lately, given global health stuff in the last half decade).

I bet almost everybody who's ever been to Burningman more than two or three times has the same sort of geographically distributed friend circles. Same as anybody who regularly goes to a specific conference (I have friends I originally met when I was going to The Perl Conference in the late 90's), or festival (I have a close cicrle of friend who mostly live 1000km away that I met/meet every year at a music festival).

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