Somewhere in the last decade, every public platform quietly stopped being for you and started being for the algorithm that decides what you see. The feed isn’t a record of what your friends are doing; it’s a slot machine tuned to keep your thumb moving. You can feel the difference even when you can’t name it.
The group chat is the one room that got left alone. Nobody’s optimizing it, because there’s nothing to optimize — there’s no ranking, no engagement score, no ad slot to protect. It’s just the six or ten people you’d actually want to hear from, saying things in the order they happened to think of them.
Every other space online had to earn its keep by capturing attention at scale, which meant it eventually got tuned for outrage, novelty, or dopamine — the three things that reliably beat “quality” in a feed ranking. The group chat never had to earn anything. It’s not trying to hold a stranger’s attention. It already has yours, for free, because you like the peopl
