Imagine a group chat as the bustling kitchen of a high-end restaurant. In place of culinary masterpieces, it’s ideas, gossip, and insights that are cooked up, seasoned, and served. Just as a great dinner party brings together eclectic personalities for a memorable evening, a stellar group chat assembles diverse voices for ongoing, vibrant conversations. Basically Sriram’s awesome post on great group chats.

Being part of the right group chat can feel like having a peek at the kitchen of a restaurant but instead of food, messy ideas and gossip fly about in real time, get mixed, remixed, discarded, polished before they show up in a prepared fashion in public.

Which leads to the question: what makes one of these work? I’ve been a part of several groups and have tried to stand up many myself and I find the same patterns repeating across all the good ones. The best ones are a “forever dinner party” – good friends and conversation happening in perpetuity. They often share the below.

What makes them great

The leader is a gardener, not a carpenter

A strong and fair central leader who sets the tone and enforces the rules. The open source community uses the phrase “benevolent dictator” but I think this is more akin to a gardener who knows how to tend a garden – plant seeds, pluck weeds, water, and always give the garden the love and care it deserves.

A good group chat gardener has to know when to bring in new members, when to bring in new ideas or shut down conversation and generally keep the dinner party going in a manner that is fun for everyone. At any given moment, this person has a certain intangible but very real instinct of the vibe of the group.

This person also lays down the law: a misbehaving member or someone breaking Chatham House rules (unspoken but accepted in most groups) will find themselves immediately kicked out. Cooling rods and nuclear reactors: Cooling rods are used in nuclear reactors to control the rate of the reaction. When they pull back, the rate increases and when they go in, the reaction slows down.

The cooling rods ensure the chat isn’t overwhelmed

Every group chat usually has one or two people that like to talk… a lot. They are critical: you need the provocateurs who inject new ideas consistently. However, almost all of them have a tendency to dominate these groups.

This is where the cooling rods come in. This is usually the BDFL or some trusted member who can judge the state of the group. Conversation slowing down? Get some of these spicy provocative takes going. Conversation getting heated/dominated? Take someone aside and calm them down. No different from a friend of mine who tries to get everyone’s glasses filled again and again if he feels the dinner getting boring.

The n-1 group to avoid “that guy”

side note: I guess that’s usually me

Every group I’ve been a part of has had multiple side chats. This is to either make fun of, discuss in private, or just to avoid certain loud personalities. This is desired! I look for this to know if a certain community is “working”.

This leads to one of my favorite axioms: every group chat has a n-1 group containing everyone except that annoying member. And if you think your chat doesn’t have such a group, oh boy, do I have some bad news for you.

Bring: Just the right blend of people

There is a touch of alchemy to picking the right people to come into a chat. A great dinner party doesn’t have the same kind of person – the best ones have a mix. You have someone who will be entertaining, perhaps someone famous, someone who is warm and keeps the conversation going, and definitely someone who will be a great raconteur. A good group chat needs a mix of personalities. Some archetypes:

• the very online person who is familiar with participating in chat at all times
• The celebrity who everyone is surprised to see in a chat.
• The deeply thoughtful people who don’t speak up often but when they do, have real depth to their opinions
• The cheerful bon vivants who keep the group light/funny/fresh.

Beware: Gravitational pull of a few topics

It is common for group chats to suffer from audience capture and start circling the same topics incessantly. This happens in a few ways:

• Certain topics gain outsized influence and the group can’t stop having the same debate ad nauseam

• Two or three people in the group align themselves into various teams and feel locked into supporting or opposing the same causes or people every single time. In the chats I moderate, I always look out for two people arguing with each other incessantly.

• The angriest/most provocative topic usually winds up sucking the most oxygen. I’ve seen many groups die because they couldn’t get past talking about the one issue they disagreed on. This is where variety comes in. You need a constant injection of new ideas, themes, and members into the mix. Stagnation is death.

Maintain: Size, Pruning, Value

Every good group chat has an inverse relationship with size. It is impossible to add new members forever without decreasing quality. Over time, the group decays in quality and I often find groups with >100 members unsustainable. Far below Dunbar’s number, it breaks some human model of intimacy.

This is where pruning comes in. Good group chats make you earn your spot periodically. And if you haven’t participated in a meaningful way in a while, you should find yourself kicked out.

• On the flip side, one of the best ways to add value to a group is to suggest a good new member who will fit in.

Shared rituals

The best groups have shared rituals, jokes, and routines. They range from the simple (post the same thing every week) to something deeper (organize a multi-day trip once a year). These rituals bring people together in deep ways and give meaning. After seeing several of these, you can easily see how religions and communities need these as a bonding experience.

Igor’s thinking helpers for the original article

• Default Questions
• Core Problems
• Be a better writer

Community Guidelines

Being a community member sounds obvious - but turns out there are some real best practices. Here are some great ones

From Hacker News

The source

In Comments

• Be kind. Don’t be snarky. Converse curiously; don’t cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

• Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

• When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. “That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3” can be shortened to “1 + 1 is 2, not 3.”

• Please don’t fulminate. Please don’t sneer, including at the rest of the community.

• Please assume good faith, and respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that’s easier to criticize.

• Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

• Please don’t post shallow dismissals, especially of other people’s work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

• Please don’t have political or ideological battles. That tramples curiosity.

• Please don’t comment on whether someone read an article. “Did you even read the article? It mentions that” can be shortened to “The article mentions that”.

• Please don’t pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.

• Please don’t use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

• Please don’t post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

• Please don’t complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They’re too common to be interesting.

• Please don’t complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don’t feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag, please don’t also comment that you did.

• Please don’t post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It’s a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.

In Submissions

• Please don’t do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or saying how great an article is. It’s implicit in submitting something that you think it’s important.

• Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter.

• Please don’t use HN primarily for promotion. It’s ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.

• If the title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link.

• If the title contains a gratuitous number or number + adjective, we’d appreciate it if you’d crop it. E.g. translate “10 Ways To Do X” to “How To Do X,” and “14 Amazing Ys” to “Ys.” Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. “The 5 Platonic Solids.”

• Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don’t editorialize.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has a great list of policies that are worth reading