This would have been hilarious if nobody had replied…

It’s all in your head dude. Don’t worry about it.

Gotta get there earlier … before all those other thoughts get a chance to drown out your perfectly sensible thoughts.

I don’t do group chats anymore because whatever I say gets unanswered, or replied to and buried in the conversation.

With friends we do video chat. Also seems in large group chats, there are often like 10 different parallel conversations going on and it is hard to keep track of. No one waits or treats it like an actual group discussion.

its you.

i used to struggle with this too, op.

the only reason i don’t struggle with it anymore is because i ran out of sufficient energy to struggle.

however, that was not what resolved it–not directly.

no longer agonizing over my conversations had other effects.

i decided that if all i can be is background noise, then i shall be background noise. and that … loosened my hesitation. i physically lost the ability to attach any kind of ulterior motive or emotional baggage to what i wanted to say, and so, my messaging became more open and honest as a result, in a way i never had the choice to implement at will. it took breaking down to no longer proverbially have a wall there.

and then, at another point after this had metaphorically cleaned my slate, i decided to start over by embodying what i felt was missing. i would be the warmth that no one was showing. i would greet, and encourage, and ask nonbinary question–but i don’t think this would have worked if i had not first shattered my own guard and begun engaging my social interactions with totally exposed vulnerability.

Why are you in so many group chats though? Just cliquish behaviors.

If this was reddit this thread would have no replies.

Been there done that.

A few years back I went back to an old Internet haunt that I hadn’t been to in more years still.

People were there, chatting, including at least one person I knew who’d been there previously. I should have taken the hint when he joked that he “didn’t spend a lot of time there, honest” (paraphrase), but I basically picked up where I’d left off years before rather than feel out the new vibe. There were about twenty or so people there at first, and I only really noticed when there were ten or so left and they weren’t saying much.

I left. Haven’t had the nerve to go back. If I do, I’ll try to feel out the vibe first.

In the meantime, I’ve found other places to hang out and different people. But I still try to reel myself in occasionally, just in case.

Personally, I gave up a long time ago

I just post, comment, contribute and don’t even care any more. If people respond, great, lets chat a bit … if they don’t, I really don’t care.

When I first started any kind of online chat years and years ago in the early internet … I wanted to talk to people and I wanted them to talk to me, I constantly wanted to interact and felt terrible if I got no reaction. Over the years I realized, if you really, really want interaction, then you have to build relationships with people and more often than not, eventually you’ll get regular conversations with those people … even if they are just anonymous characters in a chat forum, platform or social media. People are people and they habituate to certain places or routines and given time, you become familiar with one another … even if you never really meet in real or life or know one another.

So this is all I do now … I post, comment and contribute and never think twice of anything.

Holy shit, the sociology of group chats is complex as fuck judging from these comments. I hate them too much to ever have stopped and wondered why I hate them.

My suggestion would echo Bukowski: Don’t try. It’s perfectly fine to only respond in the group chat when something needs to be coordinated. Everything else one on one communication is better for. And if you do feel like interacting, don’t force it. Silence is never wrong. On the contrary.

I don’t even do group chats for party invitations. I just text everyone individually. It’s a little more work but it’s so much nicer, as far as I’m concerned.

Then again, I was born in the 90s. I’m a grumpy old man and without a doubt out of thouch.

There is an enormous range of age and intelligence in a place like this. It only takes a couple of dumb kids to create negativity. The entire demographic at some point in time may not align with you.

Like I’m abstracted in functional thought. Many people cannot follow abstractions or contextualize them well. People that lack self awareness about the spectrum of human functional thought and assume they are some kind of universal standard and authority are the primary negative that causes you to question yourself in ways like this post. There is no standard. There are several types of functional thought, and of those, a few will struggle to effectively understand yours. That is okay. The world is not a binary. Right and wrong are idealized oversimplifications. There are exceptions to every rule. You likely encounter people that do not understand you as well as you would like, but that is going to happen with a group that contains a large spectrum of people.

Like some people care about personality. I care about curiosity, and want to engage with interesting stuff with depth on the edge of what I understand. I also want to question everything and look at subjects from different angles. Lots of people make stupid assumptions about unconventional angles of questioning a subject.

They can smell it on you like a dog.

Do you fart in lifts with the same effect ? If not, it’s probably in your head :)

I lurk mostly, like 100-200 to 1 there aren’t enough people to get long engaging threads if thays what yoite after, , thank <insert deity of choice> for that

I used to have this problem and I’m not sure exactly how to fix it but I can say that it helps a lot if you consider what potential responses you might get before you speak. Don’t just say things because you want to say them, say things because they open up the conversation for interesting responses. This is not the same as “asking a lot of questions” because that’s exhausting, as anyone who’s dealt with a Sealion knows. Instead, try to say things that are open-ended. If your chat’s tone is comedic, try not fixing your typos so that someone else can chain a joke off of them. If the chat’s tone is serious, try making an analogy that connects the current topic to a previous one. If the chat’s tone is toxic, you can leave.