scrollback
You feel it, right? The immediate weight of obligation, the spike in blood pressure, the dread of the inevitably laggy and not-quite-right navigation of conversational history. And that's a screenshot, so you can't even click Mark As Read to make it go away. It'll just hang there, taunting you. Guilting you.
Sorry, I'll fill in with more text so you can scroll past it.
the medium is the model
Earlier today, I saw this 2020 comic from Max Krieger about conversation and text chat systems. (In a rare departure from the classic engineer-tries-to-reverse-engineer-an-established-field-from-first-principles-by-thinking-hard genre, he even gives a nod to conversation analysis at the end!) The comic is super interesting and insightful (and since Discord launched inline replies 10 months later, I gotta imagine pretty influential), but I got to this panel and became immediately uncomfortable:
Oh no. The scrollback.
In the middle of this comic full of deep thoughts about how people converse and how to best model conversation in a text medium, we've still got scrollback: Stuff happened! Gotta catch up! Can't participate until we're up to speed! The alternative is to express through action what we know is the truth in our heart of hearts: We don't care that much, actually. We're bad friends. Maybe we'll cover that with protestations about how we can't possibly be expected to read all that, and our friends will catch us up themselves unless they're bad friends. It's not us, it's them.
wait that's a bad model
But that's what happens in real life, isn't it? If you're at a party or you go to a dinner and you see your friends over there chatting amongst themselves, you go over and you say Hey, what's happening0, and they say Julie was just telling us about their new fish and you go from there. Your friends do catch you up. There is no record of the conversation they were having, so they meet you where you are, get you up to speed, and everybody goes back to talking about Julie's fish.
How come our chat systems don't do that?
is there a medium for a better model?
Just like in the comic, our chat conversations have structure now. In every flavor of text-based chat I'm in — individual direct messages, family groups, gaming communities full of strangers asking for help, topical communities full of enthusiasts, spaces for solidarity and moral support, spaces for activism — every single community has embraced every structural addition. Inline replies, threads, and reactions are all standard functionality, and in some cases enforced community conventions, that I now feel constricted without.
The structure adds context. Why can't the context enable a better interface? Replies and threads group messages into conversations, and reactions highlight messages that were important or impactful. What if my chats welcomed me back with Hey, here's what you missed! instead of Don't even think about participating until you've done your homework?
I am not a designer and I have no talent for drawing (hard to believe, I know), so lemme explain:
- The bigger colored circles and white horizontal squiggles in the top bit are the regular text chat part (the circles are people's avatars and the squiggles are text).
- The small white circle at the bottom is you, and the horizontal bar is your text entry box.
(That's supposed to be a crude representation of the group chat applications we use all the time — Slack, Teams, Discord, IRC, whatever. Panel for the conversation, panel for your message entry. If your favorite group chat uses bubbles, fine, that works too, just imagine that instead.)
- The green squares and arrows are a carousel of conversational snippets from the period you were gone.
Traverse the carousel to see the important bits of what you missed. Dismiss the green boxes from there, or get a bigger (still inline) preview, or navigate back to that part of the conversation.
The critical idea is that when you return to the conversation, you're not immediately kicked back out again into the historical archives. You're back, and the stuff that happened while you were gone is organized and handed to you politely while you reintegrate. You can skim through it, or dive deep, or drop it altogether, all without leaving the current conversation.
i can't believe i'm saying this
I would bet that the conversational organizing necessary for a “find the important parts” system is possible in the modern chat landscape thanks to the structural enhancements we've all accustomed ourselves to. Dr. Benjamin Anible, my in-house linguistics researcher, says what I'm looking for is salience, a measure of how important or relevant any given piece of text is in relation to the text around it. He says “reactions” are good inputs for a salience heuristic because they can flag emotion, and emotional response is a salience signal. “Threads” and “replies” are great for tracking conversational activation status — whether a given semantic unit is new, reintroduced, or maintained — and activation status lets you access referents across a discourse, which is another avenue into salience. He says this is all the domain of latent semantic analysis.
sigh
I'm hugely (no, hugely) skeptical of large language models, but that all sounds like something they'd probably be really good at. Organizing, categorizing, summarizing, pattern-matching. Probably you don't need it, probably just the existing implementations of reactions and replies and threads is enough to get going without contributing to the inevitable en-gpt-ification of the world.
But I bet it'd help. Damnit.
if this were an idea somebody would have had it already
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. You can look at my terrible tldraw mockup if you want. Please tell me which chat application already does this so I can make all my friends switch and we can all stop the scrollback tyranny ✊🏻
(I've got a whole other rant simmering about how I should be able to add structural context to my conversations after the fact but I don't usually have ideas so I'm tired now.)
#scrollback #chat #groupChat #gpt #llm #ux #linguistics #conversationAnalysis
0if you're a geriatric millennial
from @ello@void.ello.tech
