Humans in the world

[dream]

I write this from an airport. Over the last three hours, for one reason or another, I had to trek across the terminals back and forth. I people-watched and listened into lives 2-7 words at a time. I saw so many smiles, expressions of love, warm thank yous, and laughs. I heard worries, job offers, praise, and jokes. I found something I miss and it was all around me, and perhaps it always was. Humanity. The bright side. I should pay better attention more often.

[Melooon]

I people-watched and listened into lives 2-7 words at a time

I think there is something quite important and warming about fragmentary interactions like this and its something that's totally missing on the web, with most tech, the interaction is all or nothing; you get all of a discussion or you can't see it at all.

It would be super interesting to find a way to make fragment interactions happen online - where you can see snippets of chats, moments of profiles and other little glimpses into lives that float past without requiring your interaction or scrutiny - I think that would reallyy change the nature of how people think about digital connections and produce some super interesting results!

[dream]

agreed, and my post in the suggestions thread isn’t entirely unrelated. chat is an open space where multiple conversations can play out and where many listen in, and with tts, listening in especially while looking elsewhere, focusing elsewhere becomes real

[tertiaryapocalypse]

It would be super interesting to find a way to make fragment interactions happen online - where you can see snippets of chats, moments of profiles and other little glimpses into lives that float past without requiring your interaction or scrutiny...

the only thing that really comes to mind for me here is my experience of that split second between tuning into a livestream and closing the livechat or between opening a discord server and clicking 'mark all as read'. both of those are opt in fragmentary interactions, too.... i agree, it'd be lovely to be able to just implement this in a day-to-day web-browsing experience, especially in a way that doesn't feel so public-facing.

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Instead of clearing the shoutbox completely, you could implement a function that randomly replaces words with ... as time passes. A sentence is deleted when it contains no words and it reaches the upmost line.