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.

[JINSBEK]

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!

That’s actually something I really like about status.cafe. Though not interactive, ideally, it (and other microblogging platforms) offer vignettes into people’s experiences and current thoughts and feelings. Like the mind-reading ability in The World Ends With You. Currently, it seems most of status.cafe’s userbase skews younger and trained heavily in Twitter/X, where the expectation and pressure is to “perform” wittily for Likes and Replies, not actual microjournalling. I wonder if Twitter’s social interactions would be different if we just took out the “Likes”.

[Xanoverse]

That’s actually something I really like about status.cafe.

EXACTLY, me too T-T I've been obsessed with status cafe ever since I found out about it not long ago. It's so nice  to just see like a stream of thoughts from various people across the world, it's like peeking into the stream of consciousness of Humanity.


Also I haven't played much VR Chat, but from what I've played (you don't need VR to play it) I did get kind of that feeling of catching fragments of conversations. Just walking around in a server or sitting on a bench somewhere. I also see it as an amazing invention, it's really nice to be able to hear from so many people even though they are miles away in real life.

[Corrupted Unicorn]

I don't know if this is the right place to write this, but today I overheard at the bus station something about "caring only about what's within arm's reach". It felt to me as a way to ward off savior complex / the urge of getting involved in any and all causes.