Rules for effective communication in group chats

Group chats are a fashionable and effective tool for organizing events, thematic discussions. Many people prefer chats to traditional groups, as often a response can come instantly, and it is possible to receive a notification about each new message.



As an administrator and a member of many chats, I made these rules and decided to share them here in order to increase the communication efficiency and reduce the stress level of the participants.

1. Audio messaging prohibited

• The average person reads about 2.7 times faster than he listens. If we take ordinary speech with thoughtful lowing, pauses, parasitic words and self-repetitions, reading can be faster and up to 10 times. Therefore, the rule of good taste will be the use of text messages. In group chats, this saves participants a lot of time.
  
  
  
  For example: in a chat there are 100 participants. Familiarization with each minute message will take 100 minutes of the group time, and reading the same amount of text - no more than 37 minutes. Save time for participants - 1 hour 3 minutes.
• Text messaging is easier to find in correspondence.
• It is not always possible to listen to the message. At meetings, lectures, you cannot listen to other speakers at the same time. And in the subway it rattles so much that nothing is clear. As a rule, and headphones do not save in the above cases.

Some people, fully understanding the above, still send audio messages.



There are several varieties of such people:

1. Those who believe that their time is more important than the time of the whole group. These need to be driven out of chats.
2. Lazy. Lazy to stuff. This is a variation of paragraph 1. Also drive.
3. When a person really does not have time to type, and send an audio message is more important than not sending anything at all. Well, for example, they came to arrest a man and he said something in the last seconds. Excusable.
4. The boss or the person you are financially dependent on. Excusable.
5. The man behind the wheel. Taking care of your own safety is commendable, but it would be better to stop and fill your messages than wasting time with the group. Or use a voice recognition keyboard. (Are there any quality recognition keyboards?)

Compromise: If confidential issues are not discussed in the chat, then connect an automatic speech recognition bot (such as Voicy in Telegram) if the voice recognition quality is acceptable for the chat.

2. Each message is a complete thought.

It is very painful to open a messenger, see the beginning of a thought and then wait for a person to give birth to a continuation. You are already intrigued and you can’t just close the chat, but the person received a call at that time or he went into the shower, and you sit like a fool and wait for him to write or not.

3. Instead of several small messages in a row, we write one long

Very similar to the previous paragraph. But imagine that someone writes a lot of short messages in a row and each of them is a complete thought.



For the reader, after receiving the notification, the switching process takes time. Therefore, in order to increase the reading efficiency, it should switch as little as possible.

$$ $$ display $$ \ begin {equation} Efficiency_ {read} = \ frac {t_ {read \ message}} {t_ {read \ message} + t_ {switch}} \ end {equation} $$ display $$

By t is meant time.



And yet, not everyone turns off notifications in important chats. Therefore, it is very annoying to receive 10 notifications initiated by one person.



Exception: when each thought is so strong that someone might want to answer it with the attachment of the original message, then they should still be recorded separately.



Life hack: Telegram has a Slow Mode setting that limits the frequency of sending messages to group chats. More details .

4. It is forbidden to use abbreviations without decryption, except approved by the chat administration

For this rule, we say “thank you” to Ilon Mask. It requires compliance with SpaceX correspondence.

If someone does not know what abbreviation means, then their level of understanding of the text falls. He needs to either ask - spend the time of the group, or google, and try to understand which of the decrypts fits the point.

5. Avoid monosyllabic answers like "No"

Explain why. Each message should be a complete thought. THOUGHT. No is not a thought. When you see this in response to your message, it doesn’t cause anything but a butt. The information value of such a message is close to zero. This is 1 bit.



Any negative statement should be deployed.



Exceptions: situations where urgency is needed and there is trust between participants.

6. Avoid offensive and evaluative responses to other people's messages such as "dope", "bullshit", "idiocy", etc.

The worst thing is to write something like “moron”, but without any explanation at all. It's like bringing a match to gasoline. We have an insult to other people's mental abilities without the slightest useful information.



Still, the purpose of the chat is to bring mutual benefit. After such answers, buckets of slop begin to pour out and everything drowns in negativity and flood. And people begin to dream of miracle buttons, with which you can beat through the Internet.

7. When replying not to the last message, be sure to attach the message to which you reply

So that people do not have to guess and wonder.

Except when the client program displays all the previous quoted letters and a huge sheet is formed. It’s inconvenient for people on smartphones to read.

8. For any non-instant response, refer to the interlocutor via @

In this case, the person will receive a special notification from the messenger that he was mentioned, and you are more likely to see the answer.

9. Do not ask rhetorical questions that can be understood literally and lead discussion into the wilds

The textual nature of chats leaves a lot of intonation behind. Therefore, what is obviously a question for you that does not require an answer, another will understand literally and the discussion can completely change the course and turn into a flood.

10. You need to try to select message topics so that they are interesting to at least 20% of the chat participants

You must always remember that in a group chat a lot of people except you and appreciate their time. To do this, it is advisable to transfer in a personal or third-party chats, flood discussions that are uninteresting to most.

11. Avoid ambiguity. Express your thoughts so that they are clearly understood

“Everything that can be misunderstood will be misunderstood.”

Myers law of writing.

Before sending a non-trivial message, we read it through the eyes of the addressee.

All from the same opera: we value other people's time and protect chat from flooding.

12. Any non-obvious or controversial statement is supported by a link-proof

If this is not done, someone will ask, “Why? I heard something else ”and a mouse fuss will begin, which takes time.

13. Chat must have explicit rules

Someone accepts a mate, someone does not. Someone likes to talk about politics, someone not.

The better the rules are formulated, the less misunderstandings will be, and the better the chat will serve as a mutually enriching environment.

14. Bold key names, numbers, etc.

Many messengers support MarkDown markup language . Learn to use it. Bold numbers / names, etc. you help the interlocutor to quickly understand the essence of what he read and to REMEMBER these facts.



WhatsApp , Skype , Facebook Messager : * bold *, _ italic_, ~ strikethrough ~.

Telegram: ** bold **, __ italic__, `code`.

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Thanks for attention!



If you have ideas on how to supplement or improve this list - write in the comments. By mistake - in PM.