Read tracking is a feature of many/most popular chat clients (certainly hangouts, messenger & whatsapp), and anecdotally it seems to be valuable. Of course, everyone would love to see the read status of other people yet be able to control their own read state (there are endless browser extensions promising this for chat apps, a tremendous self compromise vector). Will it ever be possible to offer this in a federated system or will it be limited to the walled gardens?
> everyone would love to see the read status of other people yet be able to control their own read state
This should just be a first-class, front-and-center feature already. Everybody plays this game. It's so stupid.
Just let me skim my messages at midnight without signaling to co-workers that I'm up and that they should feel free to continue bothering me.
Also better that other people do the same to me so I don't keep sitting there like an idiot waiting for a response that isn't going to come.
Remember status messages? Available / away / idle? That you could set manually? Before Google Hangouts decided that everybody who owns a phone should just be green all the time, which EVERY OTHER CHAT APP decided to copy? So fucking stupid.
* Remember status messages? Available / away / idle? That you could set manually?*
Remember AIM away messages that would auto respond to friends with a custom message if you were logged in but AFK or even sitting at keyboard but wanted some quiet?
I miss it.
So much so that I’ve started writing an auto-responder for slack because despite having a “Presence”/Status feature that I use very judiciously (In a Meeting/On a call/Gone to Lunch/PTO) I’ve found-across multiple jobs-people barge right through them, then follow up with emails asking “are you available for a moment?” when I’m really trying and desiring focus (and also because I’m not signing up to someone else’s hosted SaaS service to do this).
Ye ... you quickly forget how good things used to be. Remember talking in voice chat without SaaS anti-echo and -noise filter lag? Or not having everything spam my notice bar in Android so that I miss sms:es and missed calls?
Things are getting out of hand shitty with these adcentered A/B big data UIs.
