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Comment by balderdash | Hacker News Reader

I think the big question is the components of the groups’:

1) willingness or desire to contribute (hopefully everyone does

2) the discipline of the participants (I find a growing trend of people wanting to talk over each other, start talking before someone has finished their thought, people wanting to dominate the conversation)

I’ve had conversations that are intolerable with 2/4 people because they’re either hard to talk to or talking over you, conversely I’ve had lovely conversations with 8 people that have gone extremely well.

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> I find a growing trend of people wanting to talk over each other, start talking before someone has finished their thought, people wanting to dominate the conversation

Been noticing this at work meetings. It’s annoying because if you want to be heard, you have to become part of the problem… I hate it. I wonder if social media has anything to do with this, since it created a way to “win” conversations, and heavily encourages you to do so. Zoom meetings do amplify this problem, so maybe it’s always been like this and I forgot?

In large social groups I shutdown if people talk over me. I don’t want to fight to be part of a conversation. It’s fine, I’ll have moments here or there, though it does make me look quiet and weird… but there are other friends that don’t talk over me and I doubt they would say the same thing (the quiet part at least lol)

Zoom converstations are impossible with more than a few people, because there is an unnatural latency (even if slight) and the subtle body language cues that let you know it's a good time to speak are totally hidden. So three people start talking at once, then everyone stops and is quiet for a few seconds, then two people say something, etc. It's even difficult with just two people sometimes.

I do think social media has something to do with it, but I think to me it’s more the shortening of attention span e.g long form journalism -> tweet, Books -> TikTok’s, I think people just actually struggle to contain themselves if someone is speaking for more than ~20 seconds

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