Disappearing Chat
Yap is a disappearing chat room, a product of Postlight Labs.
Yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it.
Words appear on the screen. Words disappear off the screen. Just like spoken conversation, which is heard once and then goes away.
Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I don’t get the desire for the ephemera coupled with social media. Snapchat. Instagram Stories. For me, the whole point to writing something down–creation–is to have a record after it’s done.
I once saw a blog where the person had one post, and they erased and re-wrote that post each day. So if you missed a day, the post was gone. The person had no record of their thoughts over the years. And these weren’t tiny, Twitter-sized thoughts. They spent all this time writing out their heart and then erased it 24 hours later.
Which is to say that, clearly, Yap works for someone. It may even work for the aforementioned blogger. But it wouldn’t work for me.
Would you want to jump into a chat like this?
6 comments
Mel, I totally & completely agree with you!! This is why I have no interest in Snapchat, and have never posted to Instagram or Facebook Stories (except once accidentally, lol). (I believe you can archive your own IG Stories for yourself, though?)
Older Nephew’s Wife posts a lot of stuff to IG & Facebook Stories — including photos & videos of Baby Great-Nephew — and it’s incredibly frustrating to me (& dh) that they disappear after 24 hours. I’ve learned to take screenshots (lol), although that doesn’t help as much when it’s a cute little video.
I might be interested in this. It would depend on who I was chatting with, and what we were chatting about.
I can certainly see the appeal of a forum like this for certain situations and purposes.
Signal is good for planning government resistance. Yap sounds like it would be good for not cringing at what a horrible person you were when you were a teenager, and especially for not having old friends post your immature things on twitter when you’re trying to run for public office 20 years later. Youth make mistakes– I have learned and grown so much… there are a lot of conversations when I was trying to figure things out that I would not want anybody to be able to see now that I’m middle aged.
Maaaaaybe? I’m terrible about hoarding old messages – it might be good to break myself of that habit.
I don’t really get it either. It encourages people saying things they don’t want to have to own up to.
And like Loribeth, I never use the stories – though thinking about it, I can briefly see the appeal. A fun photo on Instagram that doesn’t become part of my permanent page … hmmm …
As a documentarian, I’m with you 100%. I want to keep, treasure, revisit, be able to reference. Maybe that’s why I’ve never done an IG story and I’m not on Snapchat. The idea of wiping of a blog post is a big no.