>15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances
Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
bitexploder 2 hours ago [-]
Well. Start now. Treat it like an algorithm. Schedule reminders to text/email/call/follow up with people. My ADHD was hard. I would just forget about people and not because I don’t care about them. Then I would feel bad and delay even further because of that. Just do the thing. It may never feel natural except with very close and trusted people. That’s okay. Having friends for the sake of it isn’t the point. Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.
ge96 3 minutes ago [-]
Funny I go out a lot and I have so many random numbers in my phone from dudes who added me, single serving friends for the night
But yeah I only have like 5 real friends and then maybe 10 acquaintances eg. work
DesaiAshu 6 hours ago [-]
You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards
astura 2 hours ago [-]
How, though, If you never developed social skills?
bonesss 2 hours ago [-]
How to start riding a bicycle in your 40s, if you never developed bike skills? How to snowboard, if you never developed snowboard skills?
… Do it; suck. Do it more; suck less.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a great & classic book about giving people social room, focus, support, and attention with genuineness and humour (“influence” isn’t meant in a manipulative sense). Effort and attention are required, and practice, but that’s the cost of change and improvement.
astura 10 minutes ago [-]
I mean.... Riding a bike is nothing like making friends.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a salesman's guide, Dale Carnegie was an traveling salesman and the book techniques he learned making sales. The techniques you need to be a salesperson is probably not the same techniques to build lasting relationships. These tips are great for brief interactions; they are not for building relationships.
There's a couple of things that need serious caveats -
The "using the person's name" is so well known it's now clocked as exclusively a sleezy sales behavior. Don't do this - you sound like a sleezy salesman.
Asking people endless questions about themselves can really come off as a really weird integration and can be extremely off-putting if not done carefully/correctly and with grace. My mom does this, she asks hundreds of the dumbest most inane questions and she doesn't even listen to the answers to. It's so insufferable that people actively avoid her. I'm sure she read this book and thinks she's a social genius.
"And also, if you think about these tips of smile and try to avoid arguments and greet somebody enthusiastically a lot of these are tips for making somebody like you immediately... They're not tips for ongoing relationships. They're like, when you show up at somebody's door, how can you make a good impression in the first five minutes and establish trust very quickly?"
psvv 37 minutes ago [-]
I like classes for meeting new people for a few reasons. First, there's a structure around the activity which doesn't force you interact all the time. Second, you're not entering an established group as the one new person. And third, you're all going through a shared experience which naturally helps form bonds.
If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.
But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.
Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.
randusername 1 hours ago [-]
Find ways to lower the stakes.
Make new friends with others that have underdeveloped social skills and figure it out together.
Do things in a group in some activity that won't put the spotlight directly on you and where you can observe others.
Explore therapy where odds of rejection are pretty low since you're paying them for coaching.
I think noticing how children play is very instructive, but if you don't have good social awareness that could get you in trouble. Kids haven't internalized all the baggage you and I might have about social rejection and awkwardness yet. They just confidently say "hey I like your bracelets will you tell me what they mean to you?" and if it doesn't pan out this time they play with someone else. It's the social anxiety / awkwardness that usually makes people the most uncomfortable, not the atypical interactions. Kids don't have that at all.
gedy 34 minutes ago [-]
It's one of those things: the world doesn't care (unless you are really attractive of course), so you'll have to choose:
Do I want to put even more effort into this and/or fake it 'til you make it - or do I want to be alone?
myst 4 hours ago [-]
Doing it late(r) only adds to the pain of missing out before.
vladms 3 hours ago [-]
Just because you enjoy a thing at a certain time in your life, doesn't mean necessarily that you would or could have enjoyed a similar thing earlier.
Besides, social interactions are one of those things that don't depend exclusively on you but also on the environment and on luck. I had better and worse periods, I doubt I could have had only "great periods". Going through periods is how you also learn and get to put some effort to change (the environment and yourself).
sublinear 2 hours ago [-]
In the grand scheme, it's very difficult to miss out on anything.
Taking phrases like "when you're ready" as a condescending insult or ego challenge is a stronger guarantee of pain than simply doing nothing. Your own expectations and misguided impressions are most of the pain.
There are plenty of bitter and unhappy people who got that way by being delusional. Misjudging one's own experiences and accomplishments is what it really means to "miss out".
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc.
The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.
rabarbra 4 hours ago [-]
I'm in a similar situation — 0 friends, 0 regular contacts, 0 significant others in general (though maybe I'm less worried about that than the original poster). So, I have no chats to analyze.
What you offer doesn't work for me. I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there. I've now been studying for 3 years at an onsite school (I'm there every evening after work and on weekends) — 0 contacts/friends. I moderated a support group weekly for 3 years — 0 contacts/friends. I worked at 4 non-remote jobs, at least 2 years each — 0 contacts/friends.
palmotea 42 minutes ago [-]
> I studied onsite at 2 universities and have 0 contacts/friends from there.
IIRC, it's harder than high school to make friends at a university. It's bigger and more anonymous, and outside of student housing there's less free time where students are forced together.
My high school class wasn't too much larger than Dunbar's number (300), and you were getting mixed up with the same kids for 6 hours straight for 6 years.
My university wasn't even that large, and I think there were ~>3,000 kids in my year and plenty enough in my major that it wasn't uncommon (without deliberate effort) to have zero overlap from semester to semester.
sublinear 1 hours ago [-]
That's a really strong signal you are either being too picky or focused on yourself. This isn't necessarily "bad", just an observation. Sometimes the environments you put yourself in lack the spark.
mgh2 5 hours ago [-]
This largely depends on luck, though it can improve your chances. There are places where you can be a regular your entire life and never meet a meaningful person, while at other times, simply being in the right place at the right time can lead you to someone with whom you develop a lifelong relationship.
wholinator2 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, it does have a component of luck. But it also has a component that's not luck, namely the showing up part. Of course there's no "friend solution" and i wouldn't go looking for friends by sitting in the corner of a cafe on my laptop all day. But i bet going to a makerspace, or a hobby meet, is basically guaranteed to make friends within 1 to 3 months of attendance. So don't let the doubt prevent you from going. There's only one way out and it's to start showing up
mgh2 3 hours ago [-]
Of course you have to be proactive, but even then, people for any reason, might not be open to connect - language, culture, clique, personality, etc. You just have to find the tribe you vibe with, and that is mostly luck.
F3nd0 4 hours ago [-]
The internet offers less means to bond (mostly a subset of what you get in real life), but the quality most definitely does not have to be terrible. The relationships you form over long distance have potential to be as strong as those you form in person, even if building them up is significantly more difficult.
34 minutes ago [-]
norome 3 hours ago [-]
You said it yourself, you never developed the skills. there's a learning curve, but learnable skills they are. You need the courage to start developing a skill that you're completely incompetent in, and just do one thing each day. I was in the same place as you at 32 but four years later It's another story.
astura 2 hours ago [-]
How?
throwfish3000 2 hours ago [-]
I avoided people because I was treated badly. Once I got muscles people started laughing at my jokes and treating me well. Working out is the only thing that helped me.
throw4847285 33 minutes ago [-]
Just to say the obvious, but gaining muscles gave you confidence. People aren't laughing at your jokes more because you're swole. I mean, I'm sure there is some of that. But with any virtuous cycle, it's never just one thing that makes a positive change. It's a reinforcing loop.
amon_spek 5 hours ago [-]
Volunteering to help the vulnerable (in person) helped me with the vacuous superiority. I met some amazing people who just had bad luck. Your post shows you're on the right track and might be ready to make the next step.
subtlejellyfish 1 hours ago [-]
For what it's worth, it's never too late to keep in touch. You said you wish you'd kept in touch, if you're able, you should reach out. No one cares that its been awhile (and they're equally culpable), most people are happy and/or flattered you were thinking of them.
lowercased 3 hours ago [-]
Perhaps the name "ZpJuUuNaQ5" makes it harder for people to be able to do casual chit chat and introduce you to their friends?
eddieroger 1 hours ago [-]
> Hey, Z, how's it going?
People have had "weird" or out of the norm nicknames forever. Where do you think nicknames come from?
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that’s not their real name. But if it is, it would make it easier to strike up conversations. “What an unusual name. How do you pronounce it, again? How’s that spelled? What’s the story behind it?”
thisisauserid 2 hours ago [-]
Taking a look at your past comments, I agree with you about you curating "vacuous superiority."
That kind of self insight is valuable.
So maybe, ya know, stop pretending on the internet that you have things figured out?
chinathrow 1 hours ago [-]
> I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere
It's not too late, but it might need more effort than if earlier.
fullstop 55 minutes ago [-]
You're only 29 -- I have good friends in my life that I didn't meet until I was in my 40s.
You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.
I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.
It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.
She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.
I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.
How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?
sureMan6 3 hours ago [-]
You have to find people you value, then it'll feel worth it
latexr 6 hours ago [-]
> There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.
Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.
That is the saddest thing I have read on this website.
throwfish3000 2 hours ago [-]
I know it seems stupid, but hit the gym. People will want to be around you if you have muscles.
rhines 1 hours ago [-]
There's some truth to this, and I'm sorry it's been your experience, but I'd like to gently expand on this a bit as I don't think muscles are the only thing that matter - I know plenty of skinny and fat people with friends.
Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When making new friends, proxies like attractiveness and social standing are how people judge if someone is likely to add value to their lives or not.
So yes, unfortunately, if you talk to someone and you're just some small quiet guy with no interesting characteristics, you'll probably be written off before you get a chance to develop a friendship with them. Whereas if they see you have muscles, or know you're successful in your career, or know you have other friends, they'll be more likely to assume you might be worth getting to know.
Things like working out, dressing well, learning to speak well, etc. all help. However, there is an alternative shortcut to building close friendships - forced interaction. When you're stuck sitting next to someone in class for a year, you don't have the privilege of swapping that person out for someone who seems cooler, you just have to get to know them. When you're stationed in the military with a squad you don't get to swap that squad out for people you think you might like more, you just bond with them. But there are few opportunities like that in normal life, you have to seek them out. Go on a 2 week long canoeing expedition, join a start-up incubator with a small team, play an MMO at a competitive level where you have scheduled runs and are in voice chat. Do stuff that forces you to interact with people for a long time and puts you in environments where you can't just leave and seek out people more like you.
latexr 52 minutes ago [-]
You’ve crafted a well-meaning response, so I want to preface this by saying I’m not poo-pooing on your response at all. Rather, I want to share some other complementary views.
> barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family.
I’d argue your immediately family isn’t deserving of unconditional love. Unfortunately, familial relationships can be much more toxic than other relationships precisely because you feel an obligation to make a bigger effort to not sever them. But if they’re bad and you’ve done a real effort towards reconciliation and failed, you should cut them out for your own sanity.
I have friends for whom I care much more than family.
> Whereas if they see you have muscles, (…) dressing well
Careful, as those are not universal. Placing too much emphasis on physical appearance can have the opposite effect and make other people preemptively judge you negatively.
rhines 45 minutes ago [-]
Good points, I definitely generalized and you raise important distinctions. I think in general the unconditionality of familial love extends more towards your dependents rather than your parents/siblings - if you dislike your child, it's really your responsibility to raise them better, rather than just abandoning them. But if you have abusive parents or a toxic sibling, you should prioritize your health and happiness.
And it's also true that certain sub-cultures will judge you differently. Like if you're all beefed up and dressed in a suit, you're probably not getting an invite to Dungeons and Dragons club. I would say in general following your country's norms for attractiveness will result in more social success but if you present yourself inauthentically you certainly can end up attracting people you actually don't want to associate with.
the_af 17 minutes ago [-]
> Careful, as those are not universal. Placing too much emphasis on physical appearance can have the opposite effect and make other people preemptively judge you negatively.
Yup. To me, a muscled/fitness-type guy who seems to care too much about his appearance is a turn-off, I'd be unlikely to seek friendship. It signals to me "we share very little in common". Which, to be clear, is a prejudice, but if we're discussing physical appearance, that's what this is about.
Also, something similar happens with (some, not all!) guys being afraid to approach very attractive women because they seem out of their league. And the same must happen to some women.
latexr 1 hours ago [-]
People will want to be around you if you’re kind and generally pleasant, which is a much stronger reason to hang out with someone and leads to much longer lasting and healthier bonds than a physical trait. It also costs nothing and once you can get into that mindset, takes no effort.
throwfish3000 59 minutes ago [-]
I've always been nice and pleasant, but from my analysis, people thought that was weakness. Weak + Nice = Uncool, Strong + Nice = Cool.
latexr 51 minutes ago [-]
It saddens me that has been your experience. I’d argue people who see kindness as a weakness are not people one would want to be around.
NDlurker 10 hours ago [-]
I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it
Nition 9 hours ago [-]
I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.
accrual 36 minutes ago [-]
I'm in a similar boat, I previously saved a bunch of AIM chats from my school days but only tiny fragments made it to present day. From those fragments I gather I wouldn't want to re-read much of it. :D
johntash 9 hours ago [-]
Sometimes I feel bad that I lost years of chat history from then too, but you made me realize that might be a good thing.
close04 6 hours ago [-]
I always had enough storage to more or less never be concerned about deleting stuff. I have almost every backup of every phone, computer, relevant app, forum private messages, emails, and so on going back ~25+ years. I found my Yahoo Messenger chat logs and I had the exact same cringe reaction. I didn't delete them but one thing's for sure, my writing style and thinking have changed so much that those artifacts are unrecognizable.
This was very unexpected to me because in my mind the changes only happened as I became a young adult. The evidence of these decades of logs shows the change continued to happen as an adult.
hackboyfly 8 hours ago [-]
This made me laugh out loud.
7 hours ago [-]
jasonfarnon 7 hours ago [-]
I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.
wholinator2 4 hours ago [-]
Damn, could you still call that person a friend afterwards? Was it normal for them to "wander over" and look through your personal items/computer? I think I'd be pretty furious
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
Getting furious over something Kramer does is like getting angry at a dog. Yes, you may get angry but also, dogs will be dogs.
freehorse 8 hours ago [-]
I have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come.
Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.
bauruine 3 hours ago [-]
quantum computers won't save you as they aren't helping you crack symmetric encryption like AES which is most likely used for an encrypted hard disk.
Well if it's bitlocker encrypted I have some good news (potentially) Yellowkey (CVE-2026-45585) is able to bypass it.
embedding-shape 5 hours ago [-]
I was gonna say something like "If it's MSN chats, unlikely Bitlocker even existed at that point" but seems they are actually closer than I remember, only a ~10 year difference when they launched, MSN in 1995 and Bitlocker in 2006.
I think me and most of my friends were using MSN all up until the "Windows Live" rename, then I think we started using Ventrilo instead, but looking up the year that was around 2005 sometime.
Ultimately, guess it wouldn't be impossible that their MSN logs were encrypted with Bitlocker after all :) I think I started using TrueCrypt around that same time, seems more likely, I think Bitlocker for many, many years was basically only used by enterprises.
ifh-hn 3 hours ago [-]
Why do people keep chats? I have none, oldest is 6 months which is when I set my chat app to delete them. I'm the same with emails. Genuinely don't understand why you'd want to keep this stuff. I'd never go back and reread them.
tokioyoyo 1 hours ago [-]
My friends and I have 14+ year group chat, and we sometimes get drunk, scroll back, and make fun of ourselves. Worth every penny.
pingou 3 hours ago [-]
Why do you feel the need to delete your chats? Is it to save space? Would you still do it if you had unlimited storage?
olcay_ 1 hours ago [-]
I set my chats to be automatically deleted in 24 hours. This way when we have a small argument with someone, there's less chance of someone being triggered/angered by re-reading the chat. Although there have been rare cases where I had big arguments and would've liked to have the receipts.
salviati 3 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure if it needs to be said, but one thing that is possible only if you keep your old chats is the analysis TFA made.
momento 2 hours ago [-]
The author didn't keep the chats, the companies he interacts with did.
>Armed with GDPR and data access laws, I got myself archives with all my messages, reactions, and social graphs.
inanutshellus 1 hours ago [-]
Did you keep your high school yearbooks?
TrackerFF 4 hours ago [-]
One byproduct of me storing all my harddrives going back to 2001, is that I also have all my chat logs. Last fall I decided to invest in some HD adapter, as I was looking for pictures of my friend for his 40th birthday - miraculously all drives worked, though some would just power off at random intervals.
I decided to look through old IRC chats, and I honestly couldn't for sure say who maybe 30% of the people are just based on their nicknames. Nicknames I hadn't seen in 20 years. So I decided to feed all the raw chats into a LLM, and see if the model could string together names and nicknames. It managed to do surprisingly well! Many of the chats were not personal chats, but from the channels. My most active channels were local groups from my small town, so the names would naturally be named there, but I couldn't be bothered with sifting through the vast amounts of chats/text.
I then noticed that in the mid 2000s, MSN Messenger really took off, so most my chats were done there. Or ICQ if I were chatting with people from the US.
Then, around 2009/2010 Facebook became the standard (though it seems like my account was created in 2007), and most chats are via messenger.
valzevul 8 minutes ago [-]
I wish I had kept my IRC logs but I am quite happy the ICQ logs are gone.
Topgamer7 8 hours ago [-]
I envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.
valzevul 10 minutes ago [-]
Hi, OP here. No idea how I did it ten years ago, but looking at the Dunbar layer contraction, my active network (e.g acquaintances) peaks at 275 in 2016 and gradually declines to about 60 by 2026, and the close friends layer drops from 9 in 2016 to 5 in 2026.
8 hours ago [-]
bradley13 5 hours ago [-]
Honestly, it sounds exhausting. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...
Cider9986 10 hours ago [-]
I mostly text on Signal with disappearing messages so I wouldn't be able to do this. Most people are fine with disappearing messages at 4 weeks, but a few people like to keep their chats forever.
Gigachad 6 hours ago [-]
Tbh I wish all messaging apps worked like this. While it’s kind of cool to make charts like this, the privacy implications are pretty terrible for keeping conversations forever.
A data breach on an IM app would be one of the most devastating leaks ever. And there’s just not that many legitimate use cases for keeping all history. If someone tells you something important you can make the effort to move it to their contact or notes in your phone.
darkwater 5 hours ago [-]
If the chat is truly E2E there is no way a data breach can happen on the server side. The same applies if the app is only saving chat logs locally. [1]
Now, if the threat scenario is someone implanting a compromised version of the IM app on every device out there, and siphoning data from the device itself, then it's a completely different scenario.
[1] although this could be intercepted by an attacker compromising the IM servers, if the app is not distributed/P2P
outime 5 hours ago [-]
Logs are stored on local devices and many people back them up in whatever cloud (majority not encrypted).
You or the other person could lose the device and someone could use your PIN/password (something as simple as shoulder surfing while you use it). There could also be a leak in whatever cloud service you're using, or the data could get subpoenaed because of some dumb law that gets passed, some rogue employee, etc. It's a huge liability no matter how you look at it.
darkwater 4 hours ago [-]
You are proposing scenarios in which the only safe posture is to not chat at all...
rhines 56 minutes ago [-]
There is the potential to use homomorphic encryption so that encrypted text can support operations like string search while encrypted, so unencrypted indexes would never need to be stored on user devices. It is a huge hassle though - it requires a ton of compute and is still very slow and limited, it's much more complex, and research is still ongoing regarding security. However if you want to truly minimize the amount of unencrypted data on your device this could one day be an option.
outime 3 hours ago [-]
The whole thread is about permanently storing every single conversation forever vs conversations that get deleted shortly after. If the latter is chosen, the blast radius is significantly smaller.
darkwater 51 minutes ago [-]
The blast radius of a single person conversations (shoulder surfing) which doesn't make any sense because if you are the kind of person targeted for their conversations you are going to take anyway other countermeasures in any case (in addition to probably disappearing messages).
But for normal people, the biggest risk is companies using their chats to train models / dispatch ads etc to which the only solution is E2EE.
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
Not really, if you accept the risk of it happening but you shrink the blast radius.
saligne 9 hours ago [-]
there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.
dwedge 8 hours ago [-]
I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?
saligne 6 hours ago [-]
Be angry then, IM communication is not a contract with terms unilaterly decided by one party. Or put a confidential signature with every message, see how well that works for you
dwedge 3 hours ago [-]
Be a better person. Or at least put a message in your status that you record everything and send it to Google for analysis for minimum personal gain. Do you also carry a second phone to take a photo just in case someone sends you a disappearing photo?
watwut 2 hours ago [-]
If I need a contract for you to treat me decently and respect my choices, I really dont think you can count as a "friend" at all.
rablackburn 7 hours ago [-]
Everything old is new again. This is basically the debate over IRC Bouncers all over again.
Squeeeez 7 hours ago [-]
They might not be doing it on purpose, remember that microsoft windows "take a screenshot every few seconds and send it to an llm" thing?
Do you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.
Cider9986 9 hours ago [-]
Yeah I use NotesNook for big notes or projects.
I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.
sixhobbits 7 hours ago [-]
I do some similar charting etc with telegram data dumps that you can still get from the "telegram lite" desktop app even though they removed the export functionality from the main app.
For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting.
You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time.
Wordclouds per person are also fun!
valzevul 18 minutes ago [-]
Hi, OP here!
TF-IDF was the first thing I tried - it works great for stopwords but it doesn't handle cross-language bleed of filler words well, and the short life-event messages ("he died", etc) use common words and get aggressively down-weighted.
I had some asymmetry analysis when looking at directional sentiment and per-person question rates - that's fun indeed!
I also went with the Jaccard convergence and the endearment categories instead of wordclouds, so that I could see how word choices are changing across time.
In the same app, if you go down Settings -> Advanced -> scroll to the bottom -> Export Telegram data, there is an option to export all chats at once, including some very handy controls like getting only your own messages for large group chats.
sixhobbits 2 hours ago [-]
ah right, I think that might be what is "Telegram Lite" on the App Store
I'm not at the desktop right now. Check if the option to do a full (all chats) export still exists.
dotancohen 5 hours ago [-]
Was any explanation given as to why the export functionality was removed?
rootsudo 4 hours ago [-]
This is a great idea, I was leaning towards doing it with openrouter since the cost now is so affordable then codex but seeing someone else do it, can do it too with WhatsApp, iMessages, facebook, scattered irc logs
Also email sentiment too how fun
eamag 1 hours ago [-]
Would not recommend to send your chats to some provider on openrouter. IMO one should only use local models for this sort of data
dwedge 8 hours ago [-]
Damn this is a nice reminder that even private chats I sent to someone else 10 years ago aren't safe from being harvested by AI
alexpandey 7 hours ago [-]
The question-rate finding is the most interesting bit. Also the most platform-confounded. When my closest friends moved to voice and video the text question rate dropped to zero, but the underlying asking didnt. So part of the advice-friend signature is really a who-still-types-with-you signature. The author probably has the data to test that but the post doesnt say.
alexfoo 6 hours ago [-]
The "Sasha" section brought back a load of memories from my childhood. As an Alex growing up in Western Europe with no connections to anything East it was just my Russophile father that used to call me Sandy or Sasha some of the time.
me551ah 7 hours ago [-]
As a hypothetical example, what happens if you could train a custom LLM with your own chats. And it responds to people, and gives the same response as you would. Would that be a form of mental cloning?
ashm1104 8 hours ago [-]
I do wanna do the same, but at times I fear about getting too aware from the insights of the analysis, I fear my opinions my faith might change in certain people.
gobdovan 7 hours ago [-]
Finally, a good use for LLMs. I would be so embarrassed to read old messages, yet LLMs just psychopatically chug along without flinching or cringing.
quijoteuniv 6 hours ago [-]
I really though i was your friend… acquaintances… whatever man
AdrianB1 7 hours ago [-]
I don't understand how some people write hundreds of text/chat messages per day. I am communicating by talking to people almost 100% of non-work, most of the discussions are face to face, I write or receive a handful of texts or chats per week, maybe a dozen per month.
I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.
danielpardo 8 hours ago [-]
I would like to do something similar, but I lost a lot of whatsapp historical chats switching phones...
Don't think there is a way to recover that.. right?
dwedge 8 hours ago [-]
If you configured e2e encryption beforehand and know the key, you might get lucky with the backup files on your old phone
defenestrated 8 hours ago [-]
Do you still have those phones/Android files?
7 hours ago [-]
Rendered at 15:01:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Seems like a lot. For me, it's 0 close friends, 0 regular contacts, and 0 active acquaintances. I think I simply never developed any useful social skills which would help me make and keep friends or acquaintances. I wish I had (somehow) kept in touch with at least some people I have met throughout my life. It has never been easier to stay in contact than in all of human history, but no, I had to ghost and ignore everyone and everything. After 29 revolutions around the sun, I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere. There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.
But yeah I only have like 5 real friends and then maybe 10 acquaintances eg. work
… Do it; suck. Do it more; suck less.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a great & classic book about giving people social room, focus, support, and attention with genuineness and humour (“influence” isn’t meant in a manipulative sense). Effort and attention are required, and practice, but that’s the cost of change and improvement.
“How to Make Friends and Influence People” is a salesman's guide, Dale Carnegie was an traveling salesman and the book techniques he learned making sales. The techniques you need to be a salesperson is probably not the same techniques to build lasting relationships. These tips are great for brief interactions; they are not for building relationships.
There's a couple of things that need serious caveats -
The "using the person's name" is so well known it's now clocked as exclusively a sleezy sales behavior. Don't do this - you sound like a sleezy salesman.
Asking people endless questions about themselves can really come off as a really weird integration and can be extremely off-putting if not done carefully/correctly and with grace. My mom does this, she asks hundreds of the dumbest most inane questions and she doesn't even listen to the answers to. It's so insufferable that people actively avoid her. I'm sure she read this book and thinks she's a social genius.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/17943742-how-to-...
"And also, if you think about these tips of smile and try to avoid arguments and greet somebody enthusiastically a lot of these are tips for making somebody like you immediately... They're not tips for ongoing relationships. They're like, when you show up at somebody's door, how can you make a good impression in the first five minutes and establish trust very quickly?"
If you're really hard up for social skills, and you like being around silly fun people and are okay acting silly yourself, I recommend taking an improv class. Any introductory improv class is basically kindergarten games to help you realize how low stakes socializing can be.
But I also realize improv isn't for everyone. In that case I recommend finding an activity you might be interested in and taking a class in it. If you aren't sure what you're interested in, good news! That means you get to take all the classes until you find one you like.
Even if there's no classes for your activity, anything that can be done out of the house and with other people probably has a community built around it. Use your interest in the activity as leverage to expose yourself to that community.
Make new friends with others that have underdeveloped social skills and figure it out together.
Do things in a group in some activity that won't put the spotlight directly on you and where you can observe others.
Explore therapy where odds of rejection are pretty low since you're paying them for coaching.
I think noticing how children play is very instructive, but if you don't have good social awareness that could get you in trouble. Kids haven't internalized all the baggage you and I might have about social rejection and awkwardness yet. They just confidently say "hey I like your bracelets will you tell me what they mean to you?" and if it doesn't pan out this time they play with someone else. It's the social anxiety / awkwardness that usually makes people the most uncomfortable, not the atypical interactions. Kids don't have that at all.
Besides, social interactions are one of those things that don't depend exclusively on you but also on the environment and on luck. I had better and worse periods, I doubt I could have had only "great periods". Going through periods is how you also learn and get to put some effort to change (the environment and yourself).
Taking phrases like "when you're ready" as a condescending insult or ego challenge is a stronger guarantee of pain than simply doing nothing. Your own expectations and misguided impressions are most of the pain.
There are plenty of bitter and unhappy people who got that way by being delusional. Misjudging one's own experiences and accomplishments is what it really means to "miss out".
The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.
IIRC, it's harder than high school to make friends at a university. It's bigger and more anonymous, and outside of student housing there's less free time where students are forced together.
My high school class wasn't too much larger than Dunbar's number (300), and you were getting mixed up with the same kids for 6 hours straight for 6 years.
My university wasn't even that large, and I think there were ~>3,000 kids in my year and plenty enough in my major that it wasn't uncommon (without deliberate effort) to have zero overlap from semester to semester.
People have had "weird" or out of the norm nicknames forever. Where do you think nicknames come from?
That kind of self insight is valuable.
So maybe, ya know, stop pretending on the internet that you have things figured out?
It's not too late, but it might need more effort than if earlier.
You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.
I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.
It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.
She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.
I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.
How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?
Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.
Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRG-YubP1rw
Relationships are inherently transactional. You won't want to spend time with someone if you don't get something out of it, barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family. When making new friends, proxies like attractiveness and social standing are how people judge if someone is likely to add value to their lives or not.
So yes, unfortunately, if you talk to someone and you're just some small quiet guy with no interesting characteristics, you'll probably be written off before you get a chance to develop a friendship with them. Whereas if they see you have muscles, or know you're successful in your career, or know you have other friends, they'll be more likely to assume you might be worth getting to know.
Things like working out, dressing well, learning to speak well, etc. all help. However, there is an alternative shortcut to building close friendships - forced interaction. When you're stuck sitting next to someone in class for a year, you don't have the privilege of swapping that person out for someone who seems cooler, you just have to get to know them. When you're stationed in the military with a squad you don't get to swap that squad out for people you think you might like more, you just bond with them. But there are few opportunities like that in normal life, you have to seek them out. Go on a 2 week long canoeing expedition, join a start-up incubator with a small team, play an MMO at a competitive level where you have scheduled runs and are in voice chat. Do stuff that forces you to interact with people for a long time and puts you in environments where you can't just leave and seek out people more like you.
> barring certain unconditional loves like your immediate family.
I’d argue your immediately family isn’t deserving of unconditional love. Unfortunately, familial relationships can be much more toxic than other relationships precisely because you feel an obligation to make a bigger effort to not sever them. But if they’re bad and you’ve done a real effort towards reconciliation and failed, you should cut them out for your own sanity.
I have friends for whom I care much more than family.
> Whereas if they see you have muscles, (…) dressing well
Careful, as those are not universal. Placing too much emphasis on physical appearance can have the opposite effect and make other people preemptively judge you negatively.
And it's also true that certain sub-cultures will judge you differently. Like if you're all beefed up and dressed in a suit, you're probably not getting an invite to Dungeons and Dragons club. I would say in general following your country's norms for attractiveness will result in more social success but if you present yourself inauthentically you certainly can end up attracting people you actually don't want to associate with.
Yup. To me, a muscled/fitness-type guy who seems to care too much about his appearance is a turn-off, I'd be unlikely to seek friendship. It signals to me "we share very little in common". Which, to be clear, is a prejudice, but if we're discussing physical appearance, that's what this is about.
Also, something similar happens with (some, not all!) guys being afraid to approach very attractive women because they seem out of their league. And the same must happen to some women.
This was very unexpected to me because in my mind the changes only happened as I became a young adult. The evidence of these decades of logs shows the change continued to happen as an adult.
Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.
https://words.filippo.io/128-bits/
I think me and most of my friends were using MSN all up until the "Windows Live" rename, then I think we started using Ventrilo instead, but looking up the year that was around 2005 sometime.
Ultimately, guess it wouldn't be impossible that their MSN logs were encrypted with Bitlocker after all :) I think I started using TrueCrypt around that same time, seems more likely, I think Bitlocker for many, many years was basically only used by enterprises.
>Armed with GDPR and data access laws, I got myself archives with all my messages, reactions, and social graphs.
I decided to look through old IRC chats, and I honestly couldn't for sure say who maybe 30% of the people are just based on their nicknames. Nicknames I hadn't seen in 20 years. So I decided to feed all the raw chats into a LLM, and see if the model could string together names and nicknames. It managed to do surprisingly well! Many of the chats were not personal chats, but from the channels. My most active channels were local groups from my small town, so the names would naturally be named there, but I couldn't be bothered with sifting through the vast amounts of chats/text.
I then noticed that in the mid 2000s, MSN Messenger really took off, so most my chats were done there. Or ICQ if I were chatting with people from the US.
Then, around 2009/2010 Facebook became the standard (though it seems like my account was created in 2007), and most chats are via messenger.
A data breach on an IM app would be one of the most devastating leaks ever. And there’s just not that many legitimate use cases for keeping all history. If someone tells you something important you can make the effort to move it to their contact or notes in your phone.
Now, if the threat scenario is someone implanting a compromised version of the IM app on every device out there, and siphoning data from the device itself, then it's a completely different scenario.
[1] although this could be intercepted by an attacker compromising the IM servers, if the app is not distributed/P2P
You or the other person could lose the device and someone could use your PIN/password (something as simple as shoulder surfing while you use it). There could also be a leak in whatever cloud service you're using, or the data could get subpoenaed because of some dumb law that gets passed, some rogue employee, etc. It's a huge liability no matter how you look at it.
But for normal people, the biggest risk is companies using their chats to train models / dispatch ads etc to which the only solution is E2EE.
I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.
For removing noise you might want to look into TF-IDF instead of the manual method described in the post that I didn't understand. It basically looks for words common across the whole corpus as noise or ones that appear within a specific chat much higher than the whole dataset as interesting.
You can also do some fun stuff by finding phrases used asymmetrically eg more by one person in the convo than the other, or over time.
Wordclouds per person are also fun!
TF-IDF was the first thing I tried - it works great for stopwords but it doesn't handle cross-language bleed of filler words well, and the short life-event messages ("he died", etc) use common words and get aggressively down-weighted.
I had some asymmetry analysis when looking at directional sentiment and per-person question rates - that's fun indeed!
I also went with the Jaccard convergence and the endearment categories instead of wordclouds, so that I could see how word choices are changing across time.
These are the two options I see to download https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/1e133ef5057a949b7ddd92e5668...
And the 'main' one that I usually use doesn't have export settings that I can find
https://i.ritzastatic.com/static/18db23448a373338766bf419fa0...
Also email sentiment too how fun
I find text messages impersonal and it also takes longer to communicate clearly what we need. There is so much lost. Even chats and emails for work are at risk of creating misunderstanding, especially because English is not the native language of most of my coworkers, all these adds to result in pretty low quality communication.
Don't think there is a way to recover that.. right?