It's not that I want some additional feature, I actually want fewer features. The ability to name group chats and persist them leads people to treat them like chat rooms. The ability to send animated gifs means people send them. These apps very quickly turned from "alternative to text-messaging" to "full-blown chat room that wants push notifications each time anyone sends a message," and I don't want an app to ask me to enable notifications each time I open it.
I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.
In my experience, since Messenger / Hangouts / etc all support persisted, named chats, people start treating them like chatrooms rather than like text messages. I don't want notifications for a chat room (where there's a flurry of conversation that may or may not be directed at me), and in general since I work remote I try to keep the "things that make my phone buzz" list to the bare-minimum, since that list will always include "production outage" which might make me stop mid-step while heading to lunch and turn back around.
Additionally, FB messenger does not allow you to disable "read receipts," it always shows the other party when you have opened a message. Buzzing my pocket and then telling the other person I read their message feels very intrusive to me.
Same. I initially only uninstalled messenger (which intolerably presented me with a popup asking me to enable notifications EVERY TIME I OPENED THE APP), then got rid of the FB app. Now even on my laptop facebook.com is pointing at localhost in /etc/hosts, which makes me edit a root file to look at it. I'm much, much happier. If it works for you, cool, but if you're dissatisfied and considering abandoning it anyway, I can offer anecdotally that it has been a great decision for me.
(The only reason I don't close my account: I check it once every week or so, because I have older family members for whom this is probably as far as they're going into the world of social media and I feel a bit guilty either pressuring them to use some alternative or disconnecting from them further, as they are unlikely to understand my dissatisfaction with the FB product and much more likely to take it personally)
HackerNew (apologies for my inability to present this link elegantly) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd... allows folding and dynamic loading, similar to RES. It also increases the font size slightly by default, which I am embarrassed to admit is rather nice.
> I also like the way Reddit notifies you of replies.
This is one thing I wish HN did. This is a good post, and I care far more about the replies I get here (when I have generally at least tried to provide thoughtful input) than the ones I get on reddit, but those confront me more directly as a result of the UI.
I think HN is generally inhabited by intelligent but highly opinionated people. Sometimes an opinionated discussion can degenerate into a frivolous argument even between well-meaning parties. It's helpful to have input from someone whose aim is the furtherance of productive discussion. Often all it takes to turn a flamewar back into a reasonable debate is a prod in the right direction. Generally the argumentative parties (myself included, perhaps included foremost) were only carried away; many good conversations can be salvaged with a bit of third-party influence. Obviously this doesn't apply to trolling, etc., and I don't think heavy-handed modding is a solution, but at least in the threads I've seen you participate as a mediator, it has been beneficial.
> The first is posting feedback in the threads about what's good and bad for HN comments. Right now, dang is the only one doing this, but other moderators may in the future.
I've seen dang do this and I think it's actually quite effective. I'd love to see more of this.
I realize there are per-thread mute settings, but the whole experience of using these things is highly intrusive. At least with text messaging (or calling) we still have, to some extent, the social expectation that it is known to be intrusive, so people (in my social group at least) are less likely to text for frivolous reasons.