I didn’t arrive at this conclusion through theory. I arrived there tired.
Tired of group chats full of clever people hashing out important stuff and still getting nowhere. Tired of seeing conversations that should have been thoughtful turn tense, personal, or quietly hostile.
Eventually, it dawned on me: the problem wasn’t the people; it was the medium.
Social Media Was the Warm-Up Act
I’d already learnt this lesson with social media. Social platforms are catastrophically bad places for serious discussion.
Messages are brief, lacking nuance, and taken out of context. Algorithms determine what appears. Everything is permanent, searchable, and can be easily weaponised by someone who has never met you.
Social media isn’t a space for conversation. It’s a stage for performance. If you’re after applause, outrage, or dopamine hits, it’s perfect. If you want understanding, forget it.
So social media was easy to rule out.
That left group chats.
The False Promise of the Group Chat
Group chats feel different. Smaller. Safer. More human.
No algorithm. Real names. People you know. Shared history. Surely this is where serious discussion can live?
And yet, the same problems keep cropping up. Misunderstandings. Escalations that seem to come out of nowhere. Threads splitting apart. People going quiet. Others typing more and more, trying to clarify, but making things worse.
Eventually, you realise you’re not just having one conversation. You’re actually having five slightly different ones, all missing important information.
Thin Media Breaks Heavy Topics
Some communication channels are rich. Others are thin.
Face-to-face is rich. You get tone, timing, facial expression, body language, immediate feedback. You can see confusion as it happens and fix it on the spot.
Voice calls are thinner, but still workable. You miss out on body language but keep tone and rhythm.
Text is thin. Extremely thin.
Words arrive stripped of tone. Pauses become ambiguous. A delayed reply can mean anything or nothing. Sarcasm is indistinguishable from contempt. Curiosity reads like interrogation. Brevity sounds like anger.
Text is great for facts, logistics, links, and announcements. It’s terrible for disagreement, ambiguity, and emotion. Which is awkward because serious topics generate all three.
What Text Does to the Brain
Humans are pattern-hungry and threat-sensitive.
When information is missing, the brain fills in the gaps. And it rarely does so generously.
So people unintentionally escalate. They write longer to explain themselves, with careful qualifications and increasingly precise wording, which only expands the chance for misinterpretation.
Text encourages over-explanation and under-understanding.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Group chats are great as a low-stakes noticeboard—share links, drop logistics, and record decisions once they’re made—but they’re a lousy place to interpret complex or messy topics. The larger the group, the worse it gets: more audiences, more interpretations, and more chances for someone to read tone that wasn’t there. When the topic involves nuance, disagreement, politics, or feelings (anything where intent matters as much as content), text tends to strip out the signals people need, and friction becomes the norm.
The Escalation Rule
I’ve adopted a simple rule: if a conversation gets tense, circular or emotionally charged, I stop typing.
I suggest a call. Ten minutes of real conversation saves ten hours of textual repair.
You hear the hesitation in someone’s voice. The warmth. The uncertainty. The goodwill that never comes across in text. Misunderstandings almost vanish the moment humans are free to sound human again.
After the call, stick to text only to summarise what was agreed. Texting is okay for conclusions but rubbish for getting there.
A Simple Communication Hierarchy
Text for information.
Voice for complexity.
Face-to-face for conflict.
Written summaries at the end, not debates in the middle.
We keep attempting to use the lightest possible medium for the heaviest discussions, then act surprised when it collapses under the pressure.
A Modest Proposal
We don’t need to abolish text messages. We just need to stop pretending they’re something they’re not.
They are not a substitute for conversation. They are not a safe space for disagreement. They are not designed for nuance, care or repair.
Treat them like a filing cabinet or a noticeboard. Useful. Efficient. Limited.
And when something actually matters—when ideas are complex or emotions are involved—do the unfashionable thing.
Talk to each other.
Like humans.