psst.. this blog is on hiatus.

Chatting sucks

Or possibly I suck at chatting. Or maybe I’ve outgrown it. Either way, I don’t enjoy it.

I tried chatting the other night, and my first problem was that I had no idea where to go. Where do people chat? AOL? IRC? Yahoo? I tried Yahoo chat, and it completely sucked. It was infested by spambots, and the actual people there had nothing interesting to say. Add to that the fact that Yahoo has voice chat, which lets people say stupid things instead of type stupid things, and it’s a truly terrible situation.

I think back to my dark days as a 12 year-old addicted to IRC, and I remember how exciting it was to chat with random people on the Internet. Is anyone still excited by that? Seriously, who the hell wants to talk to a random person on the Internet?

My suspicion is that people today get their fix of superficial, bite-sized interactions via text messaging, Facebook and Myspace messages, and Twitter (guhhh). Have these similar superficial modes of interaction killed chat? If so, I can’t say I mind.

11 Responses to “Chatting sucks”

  1. 1
    spudart (registered user) Says:

    haha! When the Cubs were in the playoffs, I wanted to find a chat for Cubs for during the game. I found one, but nobody was talking about the game. Chatrooms do suck.

  2. 2
    Chad Says:

    I still frequent certain IRC channels quite often. I can’t say I’m excited by it, but there’s some interesting conversation to be had if you know where to look. Most of my IRC time is spent in rooms for music, CTCP and the like.

  3. 3
    Brotox Says:

    damn tom you’ve been spammed! Yeah, I agree with you about how boring chatting is, and I never go on AIM anymore. I guess you’re right - back in the day, IM’ing or chatting was the best indirect way of communicating. . .and by that I mean scheming on girls. . .now it’s all Faceybook and Textual Intercourse.

  4. 4
    tom Sherman Says:

    I hate Scandies, Germans, British ,Dutch but I do love Polish people. They are the best people in USA. Defenitely in Chicago.
    Fuck all other.

  5. 5
    anom Says:

    use messenger (hotmail) and it’s a lot of fun but you have to have some friends already!

    helps if the friends are of the opposite sex and hott.

  6. 6
    Fredrik Liljegren Says:

    Chatting just for the sake of chatting sounds meaningless indeed. I can see how it was exciting when one was young or new to the net, but otherwise I would suggest chatting in a forum with a niched interrest-span. ..and yes, irc is still the better, since it excludes many of the newbies that just stumbled on to a website or im-client chat!

  7. 7
    G Says:

    Okay, its been 5 months.

    Anyone know what happend to Tom?

  8. 8
    narla Says:

    I agree with you. Back in ‘95 when I first started on the Internet, I used to chat 14hrs a day on Yahoo. Now maybe 10mts a day.

    I can’t imagine going to chat room and saying “Hi There” |”a/s/l”

  9. 9
    awefhawo Says:

    To take care of comment spam, I highly recommend that you use the Akismet plugin for Wordpress.

    http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

  10. 10
    Dudeman Says:

    I think chatting is really only useful for communication between people trying to complete a project, such as a webpage. Other than that, the only thing it really does is eat up your time. It’s not like you’ll ever meet any of these random people you talk to anyway. Hell, you’ll probably forget about them by the next morning. Sorry, killer323 and gobraves1234, I don’t need you.

  11. 11
    Chase Says:

    You should take care of some of the spam above in the comments, lots of porn links.

    But I totally agree, I was in the same boat, 12 yr old addicted to IRC and scripting! I havent been on IRC in years when I used to be on almost every spare moment of my day. I barely even chat on AIM anymore, I’m usually too busy on the phone and emailing.