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0 pointswpietri3y ago0 comments

I'd be very interested to see some data here. What's "plenty"?

But the big difference between the 1990s and now is that everybody already has perfectly good text chat. Plus free voice calls and video calls. Plus regular social media for non-synchronous interaction.

I can believe VR Chat is better for some niche of people. But I don't see much reason to think it's going to be enough better than all the other options that people will don special gear for it.

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ghaff3y ago

Someone would sure have to convince me that the VR made things a lot better. I'm skeptical given that I rarely even use video for personal calls outside of some group Zoom one group of friends or other put together maybe every couple months.

wpietriOP3y ago

Yeah, video is a great example. In the movie 2001, which was made in 1968, video calls were The Future just as much as space travel was. But now that we actually have video calls, we've discovered that they're good for some things, but people prefer lower-capability mediums for a lot of things.

ghaff3y ago

In the case of 2001, it also made the assumption that the futuristic video call would be made from... a phone booth as opposed to a mobile device networked to the station's computer.

I suspect many of us would be more inclined to just use video if we were sitting in a video booth--or, as is actually the case, from a place we've arranged to made video call from using a computer. As it is though, when I'm casually chatting with someone, I'll often be multitasking with making dinner or I'll be pausing the video I was watching on the TV. I'm not really setup for video and they're probably in the same boat.

But we know what each other look like anyway. Video is often better for a group call for various reasons but for a 1:1 chat voice is fine.

Karrot_Kream3y ago

I've been video chatting my friends since Skype was a P2P app in the mid-2000s, though I was definitely the more introverted/less video-happy friend in the bunch. The friends most interested in video chatting were usually not STEM folks. My Gen-Z baby sibling has been using FaceTime to chat with school friends since they were 12. Even as early as 2014, so very pre-pandemic, 15-20 million FaceTime calls were being made per day [1]. I think you're colored by a STEM bubble, since STEM folks tend to be more private and introverted. Video chatting is huge.

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessa...

ghaff3y ago

Fair enough. Honestly, probably not so much about being introverted. I'm actually a marketing person who travels to a lot of events these days :-) But when I'm casually talking 1:1 with someone I know personally, voice-only is just a lot more flexible. I don't mind video but it's more convenient to chat audio-only while also doing something else.

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ghaff3y ago

wpietriOP3y ago

ghaff3y ago

In the case of 2001, it also made the assumption that the futuristic video call would be made from... a phone booth as opposed to a mobile device networked to the station's computer.

But we know what each other look like anyway. Video is often better for a group call for various reasons but for a 1:1 chat voice is fine.

Karrot_Kream3y ago

[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2014/02/28/apple-40-billion-imessa...

ghaff3y ago

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