IMHO the core point is John Gruber equity, so it is basically a business promotion not an article: "Not only was my feedback warmly received, it begat a series of discussions that culminated in my gladly accepting a position as an official adviser to the company, in exchange for a small amount of equity. I’m happy to disclose this now, and will continue to disclose it when writing about Wavelength henceforth.".
The disclosure was made almost exactly in the middle of a long article. Not at the beginning.
Wait, let me make sure I understand -- you're objecting to his promoting of a business interest on his own blog? By telling a story about he got involved? I dunno about you, but if I had a blog with a gazillion loyal readers, I would promote the hell out of my own projects. What, uh, else is something like that for? I'm with gruber on this
I considered that, but it felt like a spoiler. I wanted to tell a story, and it felt natural and fair to me to put that advisory disclaimer in the chronology. I don’t think it’s misleading, because anyone who lost interest before getting to that point almost certainly wasn’t going to download and try out Wavelength.
Put another way: do you really think there are people who read my article who downloaded and installed Wavelength based on the fact that I wrote about it, but who didn’t read that far into the article? And if they had seen the disclaimer, wouldn’t have downloaded it on the basis that they no longer trust my word about it? I don’t.
> That’s a stylistic choice. It’s not a universal rule.
It's universal rule if you want people to actually read disclaimer. Similar method of burying the lead is used to promote quackery, info that's it's based on a online poll that five people took is "hidden" in later parts of article.
Jeff Atwood instead is remarkably compliant. I personally would have been instisting on „Common Markdown“. Especially with the reasoning, with John Gruber just not-replying until publishing and then being a child and applying double standards, when he himself caused the need for CommonMark due to the inconsistent description of Markdown’s grammar.
I remember that story differently. No one is obligated to respond to Atwood questions just because. But gentleman don't need to start digging into unrelated stories to discredit someone. Let's stick to point here.
Sounds like the fundamental bet here is that design and privacy are meaningful differentiators in this market.
With regard to design, Wavelength's particular, native aesthetic might have a certain kind of emotional appeal to old-school Mac and iOS users (including me), but fundamentally its conversation view works a lot like Discord's, which also supports threads and basic replies. I don't think they're going to win on "quiet" design alone.
In fact, I think their focus on "nativeness" could inhibit feature competitiveness down the line. They'll need to make compromises one way or the other, either tolerating a greater sense of "cacophony" or forgoing features that other platforms support.
Their positioning and followthrough on privacy are strong.
Although Wavelength seems to be well-crafted, I think its success, like the success of many other network-oriented products, is going to largely come down to go-to-market. As an adviser and cheerleader, John gives them meaningful reach, but whether they can capitalize on that reach will depend on whether they can build a compelling enough hook to get people to move from wherever they're having conversations today.
Yes, I've used Discord on my Mac, Linux machine, Android phone, and the web. I understand the hate on Electron apps, but being everywhere all at once is why people make that technological tradeoff. It's even more important when you only have two developers.
> Wavelength's particular, native aesthetic might have a certain kind of emotional appeal to old-school Mac and iOS users
It's not just old school. It's a "Mac-assed Mac app" [1]. Unfortunately even Apple themselves have stopped caring about making highly polished native Mac/iOS-assed apps. And that could be a huge differentiator if it wasn't just indie developers embracing this, but the platform itself.
> In fact, I think their focus on "nativeness" could inhibit feature competitiveness down the line.
Disagree on threads - it may be the same feature in name but wavelength and discord implement them very differently. Discord threads are not default whereas WL are, which means discord chats are noisy and threads are rarely used. The critique of slack/discord being very noisy is on point (I’ve heard them called ‘information treadmills’), whereas WL is more akin to a forum’s topic model but applied to chat. It seems promising
My group of (nerd) friends just migrated to matrix after Telegram started with their premium/crypto shenanigans and synthetic free-tier restrictions.
This new chat app is currently bait, but I'm not really lured by "threads", and the switch is a ticking timebomb.
Other red flags:
* Signup with phone number, other apps have proven that it's not universally necessary.
* Not mentioning that the author got equity of the app's company until halfway through the article.
* e2ee handwaving but there will never be proof unless they open-source it.
* Some integrated AI bot thing that nobody wants, could have been a bot API, stands at odds with e2ee, and just sounds like a lame attempt to ride the current wave.
* Mentions signal, whatsapp, telegram, but suspiciously not matrix.org, which AFAIK does have the touted feature to re-encrypt older messages to new members.
> e2ee handwaving but there will never be proof unless they open-source it.
This is a good point, and the Wavelength team is well aware of this.
> but suspiciously not matrix.org
I will admit I’d not heard of Matrix until your mention of it here. So I spent a few minutes downloading it, signing up, etc. It’s obviously competitive with Wavelength to some extent, but the first-class threading concept isn’t there. It seems more like a modern IRC or Slack alternative. Glad to be made aware of it though — thanks.
As somebody who has followed your blog via rss for longer than I can remember I am very surprised that you were not aware of matrix even before your involvement with Wavelength and shocked that you did not become aware of it during your early involvement. Don't you guys have a list of competitors/alternatives that you keep track of?
That being said I like what I see of Wavelength so far. I don't have anybody in my network that popped up right away, but I have a few people who are always interested in trying new chat apps so we'll give it a whirl.
- Privacy focused (majority of users do not care about this, all modern chat apps have e2ee already)
- Natively runs on Apple devices (without Android/Windows version, good luck getting a large user base, especially with 2 developers)
- An AI chatbot (discord/slack already have this?)
- A groups -> threads -> messages layout. Like they mentioned, the same as slack but less corporate. Seems like a good idea since Slack is pretty awful for personal use.
The article could've done less without the author patting themselves on the back about how amazing their opinions offered were.
In tech years that was a different age. Early iphone years apps were novel and could easily gain traction just for being an app (like in 2023 how anything that talks to GPT4 gets people super excited)
Given its place in the orbit of tastemaker-market, iOS-exclusive apps, I expected Wavelength to require a paid subscription for access. I was surprised to see that the developers plan a freemium model.
Of course, a paid-only model would put a hard ceiling on the total addressable market, but they have an interesting challenge ahead in finding something that a sustainable number of users will want to pay for.
This app is dead in the water. That doesn't mean it's not gonna provide some usefulness to groups of people, just that a iOS-only, freemium group chat will never reach mass appeal if their goal is to make money off of it.
Yup, the group-chat-thread-first model sounds very interesting
But, iOS only/first is a nonstarter for a huge portion of the population. If they're just trying to experiment is a small pond first to get it right (sort of as a throwaway version), then that is excellent. If they're planning to stay in the Apple walled garden exclusively or as a first-class/peasants model, then, well, good luck with that.
The fine article already mentions in the body and at the summary at the end that an Android client is planned but they have a small team so it will take time:
Wavelength is currently available only for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. An Android app is planned (see next item)
…
As mentioned above, Wavelength’s development team is very small. Two people, Henry and Patterson. That puts a limit on how much they can accomplish — hence the lack of an Android app at the moment.
Regardless, I don’t personally have any interest in this App at this time.
I mean, they are two people, and this product just left beta. They certainly need to prioritize. That would be equally true if they'd started with Android.
And it's especially true early in the development of any product, when major decisions are still being made, and even more true when there are sudden bursts of uptake, which can impact infrastructure in unexpected ways, which can then affect architectural decisions about the app.
Trying to do all of that on two platforms simultaneously is almost certainly an unnecessary dilution of effort this early in the development of the product.
That doesn't make Android an afterthought. It just makes it next.
I think you overestimate how huge that proportion of the population actually is. Android users heavily skew older and less interested in technology. Yes there are some tech users who use android for ideological reasons, but they are a small minority.
In terms of addressable market, Android isn’t a stumbling block to begin with.
I’m going to give this a try, but I wish we could just expand the sms protocol and make interoperability a non event. Wishful utopian thinking, I know, but messaging as a protocol would be a much bigger commercial platform than silod apps. Source: the gdp of the internet vs the gdp of the app stores
Discord is groups > channels > messages but doesn’t use threads (I believe).
MS Teams is groups > channels > threads > messages
But yea this does feel like forum arrangement. Which is really the most useful format for longer term conversations. Discord is great for “today and tomorrow matters yesterday doesn’t (yolo).
so I have to use slack at work, and my social interactions with friends, family and acquaintances are split across fb messenger, telegram, slack, discord, skype, WhatsApp, google chat, SMS, twitter dms and probably a few more I'm forgetting. on some of those platforms, I talk to as little as 1 single person.
I don't understand what could possibly drive anyone to making a new messaging app at this point. Even if your app has impenetrable privacy, impeccable ui, and amazingly useful features - it's not going to improve the horrible experience of wrangling a zillion of other messaging apps - and if your users have friends, they'll have to do that anyway. At this point, making another one of these feels like some kind of sadistic joke.
I wish to incinerate all messaging apps.
P.S.: to clarify - it's not like I even _want_ to use more than half of the messengers I listed. I am _forced to_, because some people I want to talk to are only available on certain platforms.
When the only friend you talk to on platform A moves to platform B, then you will move to platform B. You've already shown that you're OK having your chat spread across the services, so while it may be annoying to you, it doesn't seem like a show stopper for a new platform.
Privacy and "there are people you don't know in the group" seem in tension. I sort of get it since that's how a company works, but it doesn't seem like "real" privacy when you don't know who will read what you wrote.
Similarly, if someone new can join and they can read what you wrote, it doesn't seem very private. Your audience is not only the people in the group, but a person to be named later. (Screenshots are always a possibility, but this is normalizing it.)
This goes double for having AI in the chat. The AI needs to read all the messages, so doesn't that mean the Wavelength needs a private key?
At that point, I'm not sure that end-to-end encryption matters. The chat might as well be stored on Wavelength's servers.
We're very transparent in the UI about the fact that messages that mention @AI are not covered by e2ee. See https://imgur.com/a/5kPEdQP
Only messages that actually mention @AI are sent in plaintext to us, and then to OpenAI's API. All content shared between people without invoking the AI is fully end-to-end encrypted. Our servers don't have access to any users' private keys -- those are generated on each client and never transmitted, except in the case when a user logs in on secondary device and uses our QR-code transfer flow (in which case the sensitive information is communicated peer-to-per in that QR code). We'll share much more on this when we publish our tech blog in the coming weeks.
Regarding privacy around strangers joining a group -- Wavelength supports locking down groups to the degree the group creator chooses. You can disable history syncing, so that new members don't get a copy of prior history (which, when enabled, is reencrypted and sent by prior members of the group) when they join. And groups only grow to a size where there would be people you don't know in them, if someone chose to share an invite link semi-publicly, or allow all members to invite new members (which is also a setting the creator can toggle). Personally, I'm in a number of quite large groups including people I don't know in real life, as well as plenty of groups with 2-10 friends I know in real life, where I obviously trust everybody not to screenshot/share what I'm writing, and I appreciate having strong e2ee.
I am wary of Wavelength due to unclear business model (it’s not paid and promises can’t rule out another future double-sided market where I’m the product) and won’t use it because any integration with ClosedAI makes me uncomfortable (I don’t need an LLM at my side when chatting with friends, and if I needed it I’d expect it can be run natively on Apple Neural).
> We will never run ads. We plan to make money primarily by offering pro subscriptions and a version of Wavelength for organizations.
There are so many corporations that made similar pledges only to break them when it became advantageous for them to do so. Is there any mechanism that actually would enforce it? Mechanism that wouldn't disappear with a single stroke of pen?
Such a mechanism simply doesn't exist. A company can't simply force itself to keep this promise unless you actually trust its leadership. Similar to how Substack authors sometimes start running ads on their paid newsletters.
There is: make the service paid from get go and put things like this in writing as part of the contract. Money changes hands, there’s something to risk being sued over.
Going for network effect with a free offering means there has to be investment money keeping the lights on. Those investors will want their returns.
I have great respect for your current work and assurances on the business model. But what you are asserting is only _currently_ in your gift.
If you keep controlling equity stakes in the business and don't need to raise significant outside investment it will work out as per your business model.
If you get into enterprise selling, you'll need a sales workforce and significant cost of Sales/Goods/Administration. If you want only organic growth, you'll be ok. But what will happen is that investment from, or selling to a large corporate, will turbo boost such sales; the temptation proves irresistible to many. If you are in a land-grab dynamics with other companies, growth may actually mean survival.
There is a scalability tier above the best subscription businesses, which is mass-market consumer adoption. The twitter experience demonstrates this. The ad revenue across billions outweighs a tidy subscription revenue from a small highly engaged subscription crowd. Any significant co-investor will find the lure of this irresistible. If you gain private equity investors, you will become ad based with high probability.
I welcome your contribution to the field of messaging apps and wish you well. I hope that this can inform your judgements about business models going forwards. If you think this is incorrect, please follow up with your alternative thoughts.
Not sure what your point is, but even if on some level they accomplish the same thing (exchanging messages on a specific topic) they are very different things (slow/fast, public/private).
This is an encrypted chat app where group chats are the main focus.
The tree of: Groups > Threads > Messages is a forum.
Forums have had private forums, public forums, paid forums, encrypted, shared, only trusted device networks, for everyone, federated.
My point is that this isn't new, and that's a good thing.
It resonates, "it clicked", because it's something we recognise.
When we recognise something then we can also tap into the deep history and learn from the possibilities of that and also reflect on how they failed at times (against social media).
I love forums, I would love to see forums become the predominant form of messaging again. Forums yield slower and richer conversations between groups as small as a few people or as large as hundreds of thousands.
Calling it what it is helps access the past and peer into the future.
The big problem with forums are when threads became too long. Either because people go off-topic, or just because the thread has been going on for months / years.
If they could somehow fix that issue, that would be awesome.
The same number of messages are made, why arbitrarily force the discussion to be broken up? Embracing what the users want to do, how they want to us it, is a great way to discover non-obvious uses and to be low friction for them.
Just looked, and on one of the forums I run there's a thread with more than 130K replies https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/133015/ and so long as it loads fast and people are enjoying it, it's fine.
I just think that monster threads are hard to skim if you haven't been following them from the beginning. On big forums, I'll go through the list of threads to see if there's something interesting. The thread titles make it easy to skip stuff I am not interested in.
If there's a thread with 100 pages the title probably says little about the topic. There's probably some interesting comments in there, but I don't want to go through 100 pages...
Zulip, too, has done a similar thing for a while, I think, with threads in categories. The UI is a little more chat-derived than most forums, but there's an obvious connection.
It's good. I hope it becomes more a popular thing.
> this means that when new members are invited to a group, the existing members can automatically re-encrypt and securely send the recent message history — which is important for threaded chat, so that conversations aren’t broken.
This may be important for "threaded chat" but it's also a privacy killer. Everything you write might than be read by someone who later joins and wasn't the intended audience.
Group creators can disable history sync if they wish, and when you join a group someone else created, you can see whether it’s enabled or not on the group details screen. I have it disabled in a bunch of my small, more intimate, groups for exactly this reason: so that nobody has to worry about someone else adding a less-trusted person to the group, who automatically gets a copy of history. But in larger groups that already include people who don’t know each other in real life, history sync makes threaded chat much more useful for new group members. And even in the absence of history sync, most people will already rationally treat these large groups as semi-public, knowing that any of the members you don’t already know and trust could easily leak what you’ve said to an audience outside the group.
Maybe I'm just an idiot, but how can an app claim end-to-end encryption with a privacy first mindset while also using an AI chatbot run by a third party company? What actually is being shared with OpenAI?
Hi, cofounder here. We're very transparent in the UI about the fact that messages that mention @AI are not covered by e2ee. See https://imgur.com/a/5kPEdQP
Only messages that actually mention @AI are sent in plaintext to us, and then to OpenAI's API. All content shared between people without invoking the AI is fully end-to-end encrypted.
That is good to know and thanks for the clarification. With this operating at the message level and not the thread or group level, is context still preserved to actually have a conversation with GPT?
Yes. Each time you mention @AI in a thread, all prior mentions of @AI in the same thread, as well as its prior responses (up to the token limit for GPT-3.5) are resubmitted to the OpenAI API, so that it can continue the conversation including prior context.
The app has an “@AI” user which needs to be mentioned for the data to be shared. Chef’s kiss emoji from me in terms of transparency. Also, if you DM @AI it calls out that the message will be shared with OpenAI and Wavelength.
Good on the transparency for sure, but then again a messaging app where the headlining, differenciating factor is something that encourages dropping privacy protections from within the chat feels conceptually awkward to me.
Imagine a group chat on Signal, but in the middle of the chat dangles a big carrot enticing other group members to forward the discussion to OpenAI conveniently.
Sure, there's various other ways someone you talk to could do this silently. But ignorance is bliss vs. an inline feature to flaunt it.
> Messages on Wavelength are completely private and secure, using state of the art end-to-end encryption.
All of the state of the art end-to-end encryption in products I know of is free software.
Much more difficult to verify these claims otherwise.
Furthermore, the app privacy label on the App Store claims that this service collects your contacts. So much for privacy, then.
Any conversation that includes OpenAI's GPT also necessarily can't be "completely private" or end to end encrypted as the service must have a plaintext of the messages to proxy them (in cleartext from their view) to their OpenAI APIs. It also then, you know, uploads your messages to OpenAI.
What's the point of e2ee messaging if the service provider and OpenAI can read it all the moment you loop in the headline feature (GPT in your groupchat)?
Ultimately, threaded e2ee groupchat is a feature (ideally a feature added to Signal), not an app/company.
> Furthermore, the app privacy label on the App Store claims that this service collects your contacts. So much for privacy, then.
FWIW, it’s up to the user whether to allow that. I don’t recall the language the app uses to describe the contact request, it seemed reasonable but I didn’t allow it.
Correct. Sharing contact information is opt-in, and what gets stored on the server is only salted and hashed phone numbers, not even names. It’s just a way to find people on Wavelength whose phone numbers are in your contacts. Also, if you later choose to delete your contacts from Wavelength, everything stored on the server is deleted. The privacy policy makes this clear, I think.
Salting and hashing phone numbers doesn’t do much to obfuscate them because the whole range of phone numbers is brute-forcible. Wavelength (or any attacker who gains access to Wavelength’s database) effectively has all phone numbers users upload. To reverse the hashing, just compute 10 million hashes per valid US area code.
And it’s a tiny amount of work if you just want to know which users have a contact with one specific phone number.
Much better would be to store no contact information at all server-side.
It's iOS/Mac only which makes it a non starter in most of Europe. We're 70% Android here.
But anyway I'm not looking for the next chat app anymore.. there's already too many. I bridge everything to matrix now to have everything in one place. WhatsApp, signal, telegram, discord, slack etc. I don't want to use this new thing until a bridge becomes available to it and some of my contacts prefer it as their main contact method. It sounds like this is a long way away.
Really any of the platforms can support it. Reddit has 'reddiquette' and all it would take is allow reporting on more civility-oriented offenses (like cursing, etc...).
Most social networks currently don't allow reporting low-level offenses so it's either a major violation or just ignored entirely. I would greatly prefer Reddit and Twitter if I could cut out large chunks of low quality posters.
I guess there is something to be said about your speech having intended consequences (ie, preventing attacks/vitriol), but unintended consequences...
Arguably everything is E2E encrypted but that won't prevent someone in the discussion from taking a screenshot (thus removing context) and tweeting it, will it?
Sure, but also chat software usually makes group chats possible, and with some (eg. telegram) you have groups with 100k+ people there.
Considering the amount of politically-incorrect, politically-sensitive etc. stuff (ukraine-russia war, anti government protests, recently anti-covid protests, basic software/... piracy, ...), having anonimity is a huge feature.
I get his beef with Slack, but this is just Discord for people who don't want to talk to Android users. What's his problem with Discord, other than uselessly calling it ugly?
I don't have a "beef" with Discord, but I have the feeling I really don't get it when I use it.
I joined a couple of servers related to games I play and some sports. But I feel like there's conversations going on that I can't see. Do I need to message some special bot? Do I need an invite or be admitted before I can see some hidden channels? There are voice chats, there are so many settings.
I definitely feel like I need someone to handhold and clue me in to a few more things about it before I feel "comfortable" using it. Discord is a lot to deal with.
FWIW, that's more a matter of customizations for those servers than Discord in general. Vanilla discord is... still kind of annoying, but not terribly confusing. Mostly just Slack with voice/video chat and bad threading.
I don't really like Discord's threads. They're basically a channel nested inside of a channel, but they don't really interact with or get exposed in the outer channel. And by default, they disappear after a while. And the threads are kind of hard to find if you haven't joined them yet.
Something that has a UX more like traditional forums as a chat app sounds neat to me.
Keep in mind that the messaging ecosystem is big enough for multiple winners. Over the past few decades, there seems to be a continual churn where a handful of messaging apps dominate at any given time without a single one taking over completely.
I'm going to come up with a chat app called Resonate. It's going to be really cool. I just need a good website and some ML angle and I'll get some funding.
Hey, co-founder here - we think we've fixed this message delivery issue for Australia. Could you try again and let me know if you're still having issues? Sorry about that!
The app is free and it has no in-app purchase - how do they make money to support development?
What happened to "if you're not paying, you're the product"?
To register, you need to enter your phone number.
Even telegram now allows creating an account without a phone number, why is this still a requirement?
Thanks, but no thanks.
[downvote all you want, but we're complaining about facebook and others, while replacing them with a new, shiny social network, that has the same pitfalls, just because Gruber recommends it - we never learn]
> Messages, Signal, WhatsApp, and their cohorts all share the same fundamental two-level design: a list of chats, and a single thread of a messages within each chat.
WhatsApp and Telegram both got “rooms” inside groups (“communities” and “topics”, respectively) to organize groups around topics/subjects, pretty much like Slack and Discord.
Hard to justify a whole new app just to mimic features all other apps, with people already using them, have or will eventually have.
> And the best chat interfaces are in dedicated chat apps — not web browser tabs
The one point in the article I disagree with. IMO the best chat interfaces are in desktop web apps. So many things are easy to do in a web chat app that are a pain to do in native apps. And I'll take typing on keyboard over a touchscreen any day of the week.
How can it be possible that there is @AI tagging in groups within the E2EE context? The AI generation must run on server side, probably through an OpenAI API, so the text of the conversation must be available to the backend to be able to generate the AI response. What am I missing?
Very nice app. One minor nit if the devs are reading this: on the desktop Mac app it seems I need to click on someone's name to ping them. If I type "@ai hello", "@AI hello", nothing happens, unless I click the @AI autocomplete above the message.
The default setting when you join a group is that threads are not muted by default, but you can change a per-group setting to instead only be notified if you choose to reply, or explicitly subscribe to, each thread.
All this talk of native however Catalyst on macOS is a dead end transitional tech. Apple wants you to use SwiftUI for Mac as a native target without catalyst.
Hi John, I appreciate your article/writing. I understand the perspective however I believe there's a case to be made that Catalyst is a temporary transitional tech that Apple themselves used to avoid waiting on SwiftUI native maturity which has been slow going. So many issues between the largely UIKit vs AppKit backend implementations, lots of surprising behaviors with macOS native SwiftUI still. But these are surprises for developers, and it seems clear to me that there are limits to how macOS native feeling Catalyst has been spec'd in ways that are more apparent to users wit less recourse for devs to compensate. Messages benefits from having more custom components already with its own UI. This is my take as someone who's intensively explored both options and been building in SwiftUI for a couple years. Sorry for vague references off hand. Best luck with Wavelength, it's very nice.
There's more to an app than just the UI layer; Catalyst helps with not only the UIKit parts, but other surrounding stuff like app launching, integration with system features (sharing etc) which differ between mac/iPhone, and other things like that.
It holds value even if you wrote all your UI in SwiftUI. Whether it's a dead-end technology or not, only apple knows (and they won't tell us), but SwiftUI alone doesn't remove the need for it.
App Store search is broken, they are doing the Google thing where they want you to buy ads so people find your app when you type its name in the search box.
There's a ton of apps now which require iOS15, and some are starting to move to 16. If you're stuck on 14 for jailbreak reasons I suspect you're going to struggle with more things than Wavelength.
How is being forced to be civil so outrageous that it’s worth even mentioning?
The fixation on unmoderated freedom of speech is… obsessive. If they make a nice community for people who wanna talk to each other on those terms, good for them. Maybe it’s nice. Maybe it’s a heavily moderated echo chamber. Maybe it’s not for you, that’s fine.
What do you get by standing on the sidelines going “that’s abhorrent! Dear god nooooooooo…”?
It’s weird. You’re being weird. Chill out. Live and let be…
It’s ok to build this kind of stuff. It’s… so, utterly, utterly uncontroversial. Who cares?
"use your real name and just be civil" is great if you're in a position of power, a classic move to shut down people with legitimate grievances and create an echo chamber for privilege, people can build whatever they want, but it doesn't make it not cringe as hell
there's such a deep history of this approach being used to silence minorities in this country
Forced use of real names results in sexism and racism. It enables people to stalk and harass other users in real life. It's just a fundamentally bad idea.
There's room for a range of decisions about 'forced civility', but 'real names' is a bad idea.
> How is being forced to be civil so outrageous that it’s worth even mentioning?
I take issue with “enforced civility” alongside “real names”.
Fixation on civility promotes tone over content.
For example, this very thread!
Despite my comment having several upvotes, and despite the fact that it did actually spark a curious conversation as per the guidance in the rules, you are the only person that got a chance to respond to me before comments were turned off on my post.
Is it absolutely clear what I was criticizing? Yes. Was I criticizing something that others might agree with or at the very least discuss? Again, yes.
Did it fit into the arbitrary rules of decorum that a handful of individual users decided to enforce in this instance? No.
If you agree with “enforced civility”, do you think that you should have had the ability to post your response? The current set of civility enforcers are of the opinion that nobody on this entire website should be about to respond directly to “Oh god no.” because it so soundly shakes them to their cores that you, as a user, should be protected from seeing or responding to it.
I'm not a fan of forcing civility, myself, as the forcing, itself, is uncivil.
But I do feel that it's OK to establish a community/context, where a set of rules governs the decorum, and allow people to either join, or leave. If people don't want to abide by those rules, then it is OK (incumbent, even) for the community to sanction them; but only in the context of that community. I'm not into calling up a troll's workplace, and trying to get them fired. I think it's OK to ban them, though.
They'll vote with their feet. If they like it, they'll stay. If they don't, they'll leave, and it will wither on the vine. Elon Musk is doing exactly that, with the new Twitter. Personally, I don't want to play in that sandlot, but a lot of others, do. I won't go and try to stop them.
I've spent most of my life, in a mutual support community that has a very specific culture and set of rules. We don't have a police force to enforce them, but we also won't change them for any rando that insists that we do so, for their convenience. We've been doing things this way, since before I was born, and will continue to do so, forever (hopefully).
It's like walking into a Jewish Temple, or Islamic Mosque, and saying "I love pork, and it is my right to eat pork. I also want to join your organization, so I insist that you start allowing the eating of pork."
Even worse, in the organization that I'm involved with, there are commercial interests that would like us to change, and we can get some very strange pressures. Sort of like paid pork-eaters, showing up at synagogues, and demanding pork reform.
Just let the dervishes whirl. If it's meant to last, it will. If not, it will become another footnote in history.
It may also change, but that's no guarantee, and I have watched changes destroy good things. Good ol' Chesterton's Fence...
The disclosure was made almost exactly in the middle of a long article. Not at the beginning.
Excuse me but gentlemen don't do that.