Now everyone is always available on their phone, but also not truly available at any time. Presence indicators don't mean much any more because people may be online just to view Facebook, or on their phone only momentarily.

I think another contributing factor to the decline in quality of IM conversations is the use of phone keyboards. They are so much worse to type on than a real keyboard that I believe it changes the nature and quality of conversations people have considerably, for the worse.

That's why async is great, because people can answer whenever they like.

> when they were they would be attentive enough to have a real-time, fulfilling conversation

For this kind of conversation IM is not a good medium. In case of a real time, attentive convesation a phone call is much better, isn't it?

>IM is not a good medium

It certainly was a good medium - I had lots of great conversations on old IM services and so did countless others. See this related thread from the other day [1]

You could talk to many people at the same time, unlike a phone call. You could more easily do it at the same time as your homework, watching a film, or doing something else on the internet.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19370281

Any time you completely change a fundamental understanding of how something is done - especially something as critically foundational as communication - you end up having to build new rules quickly, or risk destroying either that foundation or trust in the new protocol.

Presence indicators combined with status messages (e.g “walking the dog”) were the original inspiration behind Jack Dorsey’s conception of Twitter.

I am not so sure about that. I remember conversation from my 3310 and it was way shorter blip of words. I love word drawing, it speeds up my writing by a 5x factor (or 3x or 10x, don't know).

The thing is you never really know if the other party is up for long sentences because you can't tell if he's behind a computer keyboard or a phone (or god forbids, a tablet). It usually means "I am on the phone, talk to you later")

Really? I could imagine some (or maybe even most) people are faster on a smartphone, but for me it's "obviously" worse.

I'm tremendously slower on iOS/Android on-screen keyboards than I was with T9. I could text really fast using T9 on a hard keypad without even looking down at the screen, despite only really using it heavily for a year or two. Then I got a Blackberry Curve, a kind-of-but-not-really-smartphone with a full hard QWERTY keyboard -- there I was similarly fast.

Then came the iPhone and screen-only Android phones and I got much slower and less precise, and touch-typing is a total crapshoot. Despite having used them for almost 10 years now, I don't think I've ever recovered to anywhere near the speed I had with even a T9 keypad.

I think the key difference is a hard keyboard (or even 10 digit keypad). I'm not saying smartphones aren't enough of an improvement in other ways (obviously, since I've chosen them over dumbphones for a decade), but I really miss the haptic feedback of actual keys.

It seems the parent has luck with word drawing, but I remember looking into alternative keyboards a couple years ago and not being impressed. The most enjoyable and fastest writing I've done on a mobile device is with 10-key Japanese input[0]. Unfortunately I do not regularly talk to anyone in Japanese.

[0]: Couldn't find a good article or webpage on this. You can hopefully grasp the core concept from http://miku.sega.jp/flick/en/. Since Japanese phonetics all end in -a, -e, -i, -o, -u with the exception of ん ~ n, the flick directions are symmetric. Coupled with how more than decent Japanese IME is and a few extra keys to navigate the suggestions, modifiers and other common input (brackets, commas, etc. operated by the same flick motions) you can get very fast and precise. I don't get to use it often, but it's a joy when I do. They even made a game out of it :)

If I am at a place by myself then I just talk, using speech to text. Speech recognition is pretty good these days, I usually only have to fix small things in the resulting text (names, etc.), and it's much faster than typing a longer message.

I believe mobility and the smartphone made it asynchronous because every knew you could be answering on your phone but not be with your phone in your hand all the time whereas old school messaging app expected you to be sat down in front of a computer and it usually meant you'd be available for some time.

Concerning invisibility I always thought it was a cool factor: "I am not here, don't need to be" combined with "I am not wasting time on messenger" and a lurking/stalking thing.

Why? Were there no chat history in those tools?

Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation?

I guess turning off online status completely is the way to go. Maybe it should be off by default. What's the point of showing it if the person can answer anyway when he has the time?

That was around the good old times when we argued whether utf-8 posts are acceptable, whether top-posters deserve life sentences, and other very important things...

But in another sense, they weren't, as I would often elect to set my status across my services as Away in order to curb the expectations of some people who were particularly in need of attention.

I guess that part hasn't changed, though. Just today I had to explicitly set boundaries with someone about how often they can realistically expect to command my attention away from my task at hand and toward my phone.

Sort of, but back then the expectations were different. It would have been uncommon, and sometimes impolite, to come back to a conversation several hours or minutes later as if there was no official end.

Feels weird now but having lived in the original chat room era, in which our parents' phone calls interrupted our internet connection, it was pretty different back then.