Millennials invent a forum. Part Two

Part two: Sync versus async

Digital real-time communication is definitely the biggest trend lately. Slack changed the way people use chat for work. WhatsUp changed the way people talk to each other. Eventually, most apps add real-time chat into their releases. Everyone wants to keep users' attention on the app to keep retention metrics growing, which is neither good nor bad, just another spiral of history.

But what is the ancestor of Slack or WhatsUp? IRC-based online chats or AOL, Yahoo, and ICQ messengers haven't had any fundamental differences. IRC has rooms, which are currently called "channels" in Slack. Personal communication oriented, long-forgotten messengers had a basic function – message exchange. The key difference is that they were invented to work on computers, not phones.

Slack and WhatsUp are extremely great software. They took the basic need for seamless communication and moved it to the very next level. Modern real-time communication apps are so great that people have started using them for the purpose of building communities.

It seems very reasonable on the surface. Everyone has a well-known app to join a community. There is no need to educate or coerce people to participate in something unknown. It is easy to grow an audience when everyone involved already has the habit of daily use of a chat app.

But, synchronous real-time communication has two biggest disadvantages: it takes a lot of people's time because it requires an immediate response and it creates a lot of notification noise. Yes, most apps try to use mutes on channels and add low-noise notifications rules. But the truth is that, in real-time communication basis, immediate reaction to messages kills people's attention to community when the number of members and messages grows.

So, the next step and another spiral of history is back to the forum, the most fun and best way to communicate with people asynchronously. The forum re-invented era has started recently with the newest and widely discussed "build an independent community" projects and companies.

Tomorrow we will talk about the technical, privacy, and cost aspects of using next-generation forum engines. Even if they call it "community software".