Every group chat seems to die the moment I send 1-2 texts there. Every single one. Old, new, offline friends, online friends, everywhere. What’s going on? Are my jokes bad? Have you ever experienced this? If yes, what was the issue you found out?
Maybe your interjecting into a convo and not saying something worth responding to? I would imagine that making a joke in text isn’t that funny because its not spoken its read.
I think this - and the dozens of other reasons - is it.
I’m in a handful of reasonably active group chats, and if one of my absolute banger messages doesn’t get a response, welll… maybe it just wasn’t that good. Not awful in as much that people leave the group en maase, but just not nearly as funny or interesting to other folk as it was to me.
It may be that it was the group chat equivalent of clicking a Lemmy post, thinking “huh, cool”, and moving on.
It may be that the post was so balanced and well presented from most angles, that there isn’t really anything to add.
It could be that my post went against the grain of the flow of conversation or the tastes of the majority of the group, and people chose to ignore it rather than tell me to fuck off.
It could be that people’s lives have run away with them, nobody gave any serious mind to the post when they read it, and it would just be a bit weird replying twelve or 24 hours after the post.
Any which way - if the group is still active, and you’ve not been called out publically or privately, then people likely don’t give a toss and have moved on - no harm no foul.
Holy shit, the sociology of group chats is complex as fuck judging from these comments. I hate them too much to ever have stopped and wondered why I hate them.
My suggestion would echo Bukowski: Don’t try. It’s perfectly fine to only respond in the group chat when something needs to be coordinated. Everything else one on one communication is better for. And if you do feel like interacting, don’t force it. Silence is never wrong. On the contrary.
I don’t even do group chats for party invitations. I just text everyone individually. It’s a little more work but it’s so much nicer, as far as I’m concerned.
Then again, I was born in the 90s. I’m a grumpy old man and without a doubt out of thouch.
If this was reddit this thread would have no replies.
I don’t do group chats anymore because whatever I say gets unanswered, or replied to and buried in the conversation.
With friends we do video chat. Also seems in large group chats, there are often like 10 different parallel conversations going on and it is hard to keep track of. No one waits or treats it like an actual group discussion.
Do you experience people becoming silent and staring at you with disgust when you make a joke in real life?
Nope I am not that open irl
You might be over thinking your jokes. Try not editing your reaction thoughts. The first thing you think is often wrong or absurd but it can also be very funny because its wrong or absurd.
For example, Louis CK has a joke about seeing a person walking with their dog, and also talking on the phone. The person is holding the leash and the phone in the same hand, so the thought that popped into Louie’s head was, “I wonder what the benefits are of hooking your phone up to your dogs leash?”.
Jokes need to be some version of something you really shouldnt say, for them to be funny. Reasons you shouldnt say something could be: its shocking, its silly or wrong on purpose, its taboo societally, its offensive, it punches down, its too personal, etc etc.
i used to struggle with this too, op.
the only reason i don’t struggle with it anymore is because i ran out of sufficient energy to struggle.
however, that was not what resolved it–not directly.
no longer agonizing over my conversations had other effects.
i decided that if all i can be is background noise, then i shall be background noise. and that … loosened my hesitation. i physically lost the ability to attach any kind of ulterior motive or emotional baggage to what i wanted to say, and so, my messaging became more open and honest as a result, in a way i never had the choice to implement at will. it took breaking down to no longer proverbially have a wall there.
and then, at another point after this had metaphorically cleaned my slate, i decided to start over by embodying what i felt was missing. i would be the warmth that no one was showing. i would greet, and encourage, and ask nonbinary question–but i don’t think this would have worked if i had not first shattered my own guard and begun engaging my social interactions with totally exposed vulnerability.
I’ve noticed something similar to this, where I walk into a room and it goes silent enough that it’s like the stereotype of a cowboy walking into a saloon. There’s only one place where I can trust this to never happen.
Been there done that.
A few years back I went back to an old Internet haunt that I hadn’t been to in more years still.
People were there, chatting, including at least one person I knew who’d been there previously. I should have taken the hint when he joked that he “didn’t spend a lot of time there, honest” (paraphrase), but I basically picked up where I’d left off years before rather than feel out the new vibe. There were about twenty or so people there at first, and I only really noticed when there were ten or so left and they weren’t saying much.
I left. Haven’t had the nerve to go back. If I do, I’ll try to feel out the vibe first.
In the meantime, I’ve found other places to hang out and different people. But I still try to reel myself in occasionally, just in case.
Do you fart in lifts with the same effect ? If not, it’s probably in your head :)
I lurk mostly, like 100-200 to 1 there aren’t enough people to get long engaging threads if thays what yoite after, , thank <insert deity of choice> for that
Lifts are the best way to fart, the acoustic canvas are enhanced by the echo heavy acoustic profile given by the enclosed space and it offers an easy “out” for a aroma connoisseur to linger in the space without judgment while at the same time allowing people to leave quickly if they choose to not partake in the sampling by stepping out
Personally, I gave up a long time ago
I just post, comment, contribute and don’t even care any more. If people respond, great, lets chat a bit … if they don’t, I really don’t care.
When I first started any kind of online chat years and years ago in the early internet … I wanted to talk to people and I wanted them to talk to me, I constantly wanted to interact and felt terrible if I got no reaction. Over the years I realized, if you really, really want interaction, then you have to build relationships with people and more often than not, eventually you’ll get regular conversations with those people … even if they are just anonymous characters in a chat forum, platform or social media. People are people and they habituate to certain places or routines and given time, you become familiar with one another … even if you never really meet in real or life or know one another.
So this is all I do now … I post, comment and contribute and never think twice of anything.
In my experience every chat group has a person that’s the glue. What I mean is sometimes unintentionally that group chat only reacts when the glue person(s) are engaging. So if you work out who that is in your group and have them engage with you, it’ll become lively.
I’m not a joking person and I feel similar situations. Maybe I’m the extreme opposite, my (almost) complete lack of lightheartedness leads me to face echo chambers, both IRL and in the cyberspace. I do some memes and I say/post some funny things but my essence is imbued with non-conformist thoughts.
I know my jokes are fire because I get validation here.
It’s the chat rooms that suck. 😬
Look at it like this: You know how actors are told to break a leg and comedians are told to knock 'em dead? You just floored them with your text and they’re dead from laughing.
Everyone wants group chats to die