Group chats suck
An examination of the garden-variety group chat, what Instagram gets right (by comparison), and why friend groups are extremely mortal.
Editor’s note:
Welcome to post number two of this here new publication.
This is certainly a topic I’ve been noodling on for a good long while. It’ll be interesting to see if my thoughts here are universal, or just a result of me being me.
See you in two weeks.
-Phil
As human on planet earth, there’s a decent chance you’re in at least one group chat. I certainly am. My chats break down as follows:
I’ve got my three best friends in a WhatsApp thread
I’ve have my cousins on a Facebook Messenger group thread
I also have various (overlapping) permutations of friends on iMessage threads
Over the years, I’ve noticed there’s something majorly different about group chats as compared to social media and 1-on-1 DMs.
So, in this piece, I’d like to rant, rave, confabulate, and bloviate about the concept of group texts. There something that hasn’t aged well about them. Sometimes I wonder why we put up with this shit.
But first, I’d like to describe the landscape of present-day digital social interaction.
Imagine the following
You get invited to a party. The person who invited you is somewhere between “friend” and “acquaintance” – the two of you used to be better friends, but you haven’t seen each other in a while. You know full well that you’re not going to know anyone else at this party, but that’s okay. It’s an opportunity to meet some new people.
The evening of the party arrives. Laden with a six-pack of colorfully-labeled IPAs, you request an Uber to your friend’s apartment.
At the party, you start talking to one of the host’s friends. Turns out you have a lot in common… similar interests, similar job titles, the whole nine yards. Importantly, the two of you find each other cool. (Note: that’s a prereq to any new friendship, in my personal opinion.)
Forty-five minutes later, this friend-of-a-friend must unfortunately head home. No worries… let’s exchange contact info. But how do we do that, these days?
Less than a decade ago, trading phone number was the clear choice. I mean, it wasn’t even a debate; an open and shut case. Phone number, please.
Nowadays? You pull out your smartphone, open Instagram, tap the search field, and then hand them your phone whilst uttering the phrase “yo, search for yourself.”
In 2024, trading “IG follows” is not only better than trading phone numbers, it’s like five times better.
Why is it better?
So first of all, when you “get someone’s IG”, you still have the ability to text them, as if you had gotten their number. The Instagram messaging interface is super slick, but that’s not the important part here.
In my view, the genius lies in all the other things that grease the wheels of social interaction. You’re letting each other into your respective lives… in subtle, gradual ways.
Sometime, in roughly 2019, a change happened on Instagram. Collectively, everyone realized that no one was making posts anymore, and no one missed them – everyone was just creating stories. Moreover, something interesting was happening with the combination of stories and messaging.
I would argue that the interaction between stories and messaging form the entire core of Instagram, and why people keep coming back to it. Here’s how it works, by my telling:
Alice is walking her dog and passes a new frozen yogurt shop.
She snaps a picture and adds it to her story, with the caption “There’s a new froyo shop here? Hell yeah.”
Alice’s friend Bob is using Instagram. He sees a circular profile picture at the top of the app: Alice’s avatar with a little orange ring around it. He taps it and views her story.
Bob knows about that frozen yogurt establishment. He taps the reply field and types out “just had it last week, it’s amazing."
Twenty minutes later, Alice sees Bob’s reply, and taps back “oh nice, I’m gonna try it soon!”
Bob, seeing this, replies “yeah, I’ve always like froyo better than ice cream.”
Alice, seeing this, replies back “I know!! froyo is way better.”
Okay, that was a silly example. But consider how easy that whole thing was.
Why it just works
So here’s a breakdown of why I think this combination works so well:
People remind their friends where they physically live on the earth. This is often non-obvious on other social media sites.
Mostly, people are still using stories for day-to-day aspects of their life. (Some people do post BuzzFeed-adjacent chuckle content, but that percentage seems stable and not rising, in my estimation.)
Relatedly, and unlike most other social media, Instagram is largely non-political. That makes it feel safe and loving.
Stories feels opt-in. Your friends are actively deciding to view your stories, armed with a guilt-free skip button.
Stories disappear in 24 hours. This temporary nature keeps the anxiety demons away. Posting a story feels noncommittal in the same way that hanging out with a friend is noncommittal.
Stories don’t have public comments. As such, there’s no risk of getting bandwagoned if someone expresses a contentious thought, for example.
As a viewer of a story, it’s extremely easy to drop a 1-5 word reply, which is then added to the corresponding DMs. The two parties then find themselves discussing a topic that both are (by definition) interested in. Basically, stories are icebreakers.
All of these things combined to manufacture a social lubricant slick enough to make ExxonMobil salivate.
A worse version of the best we have
But maybe you don’t like Instagram. Maybe you like X, or (shudder) Meta Threads. Whichever app you think does the best job of the thing I just described, imagine that as a part one of an analogy.
Let’s say that app is equivalent to real-life life conversation with a friend. (I know it isn’t, but just bear with me.)
To me, a group chat under this comparison would be like saying something out loud, in a room of your friends – hoping it’s a clever thing to say – and no one even reacts to it. It’s like no one was even listening. Silence.
No one reads my shit
I often find myself getting pissed in my group chats because it feels like no one reads my shit. My thoughts just go right by, like a drop of water in a mountain waterfall.
Then I remind myself that:
It’s not as if I react to everyone else’s stuff 24-7.
The way content is displayed in a chronological order plays into this a lot.
The way people view the medium, in their heads, matters here
A dumpster for spare thoughts
There’s a hierarchy, in my head.
A thought pops up in my head, and for me to even take note of it, it must feel at least a little profound. Ok, so now we have the thought. Where where do I put this thought?
One place it might go is a note-taking app – I prefer Obsidian for that purpose. So I create a new note, give it some rough title, and start typing.
I’ve started becoming much more active on X in the last year. Some thoughts feel like tweets. So maybe, I will open a new browser tab, load X, and starting typing out a tweet.
Let’s say the thought is: “I’m enjoying a certain book, and feel that not enough people are aware of the genre.” That happened recently, and I made an Instagram story to that effect. (It was a banger of a story, actually.)
But then there are silly thoughts, or even edgy thoughts. Especially edgy thoughts.
Edgy stuff – that you can’t put on social media, but it's funny to you – and you want to tell someone… that is where your “inner circle” group chat is the obvious place. The prototypical safe space.
But the thought doesn’t even have to be edgy… it might just be too boring for social media. That’s why group chats have become a dumping ground for them.
Because of this “thoughts not good enough for social media” aspect, it’s automatically subpar content. That's ok, though. Group chats should fill that niche. They’re supposed to be a casual conversation with your close friends. You’re not trying to be careful with your words.
But you still wish someone would react to your boring thoughts, and often, no one does.
When I quit group chats
Sometimes, I’ve quit group chats. I’ll be either in a rage, or feeling slightly peeved about something. Sometimes, my reason for leaving is because of the very thing I just complained about – that no one seems to be reading or reacting to my loose brainfarts.
So, in these times, it’s not like I’ve ended any friendships with individual people in said group chat. I’m still talking to my friends in 1-on-1 DMs.
But now, because I don’t have that aforementioned “dumping ground” for edgy thoughts, where do I put them?
I’ll send a DM, to one specific person, of the same random thought – the exact same content that I would’ve posted to the group chat. And you know what happens?
The person replies. Almost always.
There’s something interesting about the human psychology that this phenomenon implies. It says something about the headspace of the reader of thoughts; we’re especially interested in the things that our friends want to tell to us personally.
Overall, I find this fact to be endearing and uplifting, though it makes me want to invest less and less into group chats.
Aggression and posturing
I want to open this section by talking about one random pet peeve of mine. On iMessage threads, they only let you react with 5 different emojis, and one of them is “emphasized.”
I hate that emote. It always strikes me as little hostile.
But, to talk about the broader thing here, in group chats of straight guys, you’ll get guys dunking on each other a lot. It’s the spectacle of it all – guys knowing they have an audience.
You can call it toxic masculinity, but I don’t ascribe to that concept. I think it’s just human nature. This sort stuff can be fun and funny. It can also be mean and negative.
1-on-1, people don’t go for the dunk. 1-on-1 DMs have “intimate” and “loving” as their default setting.
Extending friendships past their due dates
Sometimes group chats extend something which shouldn't be extended. You end up keeping someone in the friend group who no longer belongs there, and this leads to all sorts of problems.
There is something better about what it means to reach out individually, or to respond individually, to a DM. There’s an intentionality with the friendship. You’re both subtly saying "I want this friendship to continue".
The tribe has spoken
There’s a meme I saw at least a decade ago, and it’s both funny and dark. The top text reads:
“When someone creates a new group chat that’s exactly the same, but minus one person”
Then there’s a picture from the TV show Survivor, with a contestant’s flame being extinguished. (If you've never seen the show, that means they were voted off the island by their peers.)
The bottom text reads:
“The tribe has spoken”
This phenomenon absolutely happens all the damn time. It’s happened to me – more than once. And yet, I still laugh, because it’s so, so true.
But don’t get too sad, because I have a lot of thoughts about why this isn’t a big deal.
A digression about how I feel about "friend groups"
Over the years, I’ve come to a broader vision of how I feel about friend groups. This has been shaped by my personal experiences of the last 12 years, in which time I've been a real-life adult. It goes like the following:
Friend groups are fragile. If you ever worry about your friend group breaking up, don’t bother…. because it’s basically inevitable.
Friend groups, as an entity, belong to a specific spacetime. The friend group is a constellation of specific people – at a specific time – having specific moments in each of their own lives. Not only do people change – getting married, having kids, and moving away all spring to mind – but relationships also change.
People can (and do) “nope out” of friend groups. You might have an explosive fight due to a fantasy football trade, which leads to two friends not talking for multiple years. (Definitely not speaking from experience here. Nope. Not my friend group.)
If there are six constituents in a group of friends, there are fifteen 1-on-1 relationships within that group. One out of those fifteen tuples going awry can torpedo the whole thing. (Or in the least, it can totally shift the vibe.)
Why I no longer worry about friend groups
My approach, the last half-decade or two, has been to focus on my own individual friendships. If I have strong 1-on-1 friendships with all other the members of the group, it doesn’t matter what random drama arises in the body politic, because I know I’m not going to stop being friends with anyone. To be honest, this is a deeply comforting feeling.
It’s also why I don’t feel shame when I’m the one who “nopes” out of a group chat. Yeah, I’ll miss out on some of the banter, but I’m not sacrificing anything real.
Group chats and friend groups
Astute (and wondrous) readers of this publication might be thinking;
“wait a minute... are you conflating group chats and friend groups?”
I’m definitely trying not to do that. In fact, exiting a group chat (as mentioned just above) is not leaving a friend group.
What group chats and friend groups have in common is their temporal and (extremely) mortal natures. While they aren’t the same thing, they are somewhat linked, almost uncomfortably so, in ways.
My main friend group largely started when I added 6 of my friends – many of whom didn’t know each other – to the same GroupMe chat in 2014. The rest is history.
One of the 6 people spent the first two days bullying me, and telling me – despite the fact that I had made the group – I wasn’t the leader of the group. (Don't worry, it's funny now… a little less so then.)
That particular chat has gone through many iterations – caused by an untold number of dramas – at times has ceased to exist entirely, and at times has excluded people (including me), without that person knowing. But it endures.
So, my personal friend group has been somewhat tied to the concept of a group chat, and I’d wager other friend groups operate this way as well.
What to do with those spare edgy thoughts
Let’s say you leave a group chat. You’re doing the dishes and then, *boom*. Out of the ether, an edgy and/or funny thought pops into existence. What do you do?
We’ve already talked about individual DMs; pick the person who would find it funniest, and send it to them directly.
What about your notes app of choice? (I like Obsidian, but literally any text editor will do.) Write it down for your future self. This can easily turn into journaling, and that’s a good thing. I mean, that’s sort of the genesis of this blog.
What I’ve found is that most thoughts like this are actually pretty bad (when you go back and read them later), so it’s good to not bother your friends with them anyway. But, some might be pretty good. Profound, even.
I guess I’m just extremely “team” journaling. (The word I use internally is free-writing, but same thing.) I can’t tell you how many times in life I’ve felt uncertain of my own future – unstable in some way, broadly – and the subsequent soothing relief of getting that stress out of your head. (I also love talk therapy for this same reason.)
Also, try to categorize your thoughts, and then figure out what to do with buckets of related ones. Maybe there’s a medium that they'd fit well on. (Again, *cough*, this blog right here.)
Wrapping things up
If there’s a unifying theme to this blog post, it’s to focus on individual relationships. Focus on your friends one-on-one, enjoy your group chat and/or friend group while it lasts, but don’t get too peeved when it becomes dysfunctional or ceases to exist entirely.
And Apple, please? Get rid of that darn “emphasized” emote.
(Actually, just let us react with any emoji like WhatsApp does.)
LOVE!!!!