Never start a group chat at 3:47 in the morning. Never invite both your ex-lover and your dad to the same group chat. Never name a group chat "small group chat" when it actually includes your ex-lover (who's also the CEO of one of your companies), your dad, your general counsel, and nine of your top executives, and when the purpose of the chat is to scramble to save face and funds as your cryptocurrency exchange collapses amid the news that you may have stolen up to $10 billion from your customers.
These are just three of many deadly sins of the group chat that Sam Bankman-Fried committed in the wee hours of November 7, 2022. A year later, the panicked texts shared in that "small group chat" — along with other chats with cutesy names like "Donation Processing" and "People of the House" (the presumably absolutely insufferable people living in Bankman-Fried's $35 million penthouse) — comprised some of the most damning evidence against him and helped lead to a swift guilty verdict on seven counts of fraud.
Though he may be the first person to serve up to 110 years in prison for doing so, Bankman-Fried is far from the first person to perpetrate a group-chat faux pax. You, your friends, and your mom probably perpetrated several this morning. Worry not. Like any good group chat, this is a safe space, and I'm here to help you navigate these tricky currents. ❤️❤️❤️
The group chat hasn't just bludgeoned social media into submission, siphoning off users and engagement from a barren Facebook, a boring Instagram, and the bilious and broken Twitter (I'm not calling it X). The group chat has become the fulcrum of civilization and its discontents. From planning Thanksgiving dinner to the run on Silicon Valley Bank to national-security leaks, from secret threads with Democratic women governors to Hamas militants to the tromboners of a middle-school marching band, the group chat is now the room where it happens, for better and worse.
People are struggling with the endlessly pinging ubiquity of the group chat. A recent poll of 1,005 US adults found the average American spends 26 minutes a day reading and responding to group chats. Some two-thirds said they feel overwhelmed by them, and 42% say keeping up with them feels like a part-time job. "Group Chat Culture Is Out of Control," an article in The Atlantic decried in September. "57 Messages in One Day. The Group Text Has Gone Off the Rails," read a Wall Street Journal headline in October. In early November, a man in Indonesia was reportedly suspected of stabbing and killing his friend after the friend removed him from a WhatsApp group chat about motorcycles.
It doesn't have to be like this. As a public proselytizer of group chats and all the chaos and high-stakes, potentially friendship-, career-, company-, and government-ending texts that come with them, I can't stand to see the name of group chats smeared and watch people make egregious chat gaffes any longer. A century ago, Emily Post tried to set order to the frenetic melting pot of a young American nation with her book "Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home." Well, society, business, politics, and home life have all entered the group chat. For us to survive and thrive as humans, it's time to agree on the Definitive Etiquette of the Group Chat. Set your phones to Do Not Disturb for the next few minutes. In advance, you're welcome.
If 57 unread messages is, as The Wall Street Journal put it, "off the rails," then I must be somewhere in the ravine, flipped over, and taking on water as I burst into flames. Fifty-seven messages (sincerest apologies, Ms. Post) can constitute one rigorous morning toilet session. Sometimes I come home to 57 unread messages after my 20-minute round-trip drive to drop my daughter off at day care. In October alone, I woke up to unread counts from a single chat numbering in the hundreds on multiple occasions (a chat with several of my friends who don't have kids).
The ultimate appeal of group chats — their necessity, really — is that they've become the only social media that's actually social.
Beyond that chat, some of my most active group chats include one with my high-school friends, another with college friends, and another with friends from the college I dropped out of. There's one with close friends living in the Netherlands who have kids the same age as mine, and another with close friends in Rome who have kids the same age as mine. One with my dad and sister and our spouses, and one with just my dad and sister. One with my old bandmates to trade jokes and reminisce about tours and records and shows of yore, and one with my current bandmates to trade jokes and discuss rehearsals and upcoming shows. There's one to piss and moan about the Mets (though, like the Amazins, that one is only active between April and July), and one to piss and moan about the New York Giants, which is laden with more profanity and sadness than I am comfortable to admit publicly. There's one each for a pair of fantasy football leagues I play in, despite the fact I have almost no interest in fantasy football; I'm mostly in the leagues for the group chats that come with them. There are others, of course. In fact, when I think about it, my wife and two others are the only people I regularly text one-on-one anymore.
The ultimate appeal of group chats — their necessity, really — is that they've become the only social media that's actually social. It wasn't always this way. Social media was originally conceived, publicly, at least, to foster connection. Mark Zuckerberg once promised that Facebook would "give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected." Twitter vowed to "serve the public conversation." But connection has long since given way to the attention economy on most platforms, between thinking in terms of tweets, seeing the world for its 'gramability, and slipping into the infinite scroll of TikTok. Group chats are now the rare place to gather that isn't gamified or monetized, where sharing the perfect meme to dunk on your friend's horrifying first date won't be drowned out by ads for Adidas and antidepressants and an unhinged rant from some blue-check neo-Nazi.
In other words, while the rest of social media doubles down in what The New Yorker writer Hua Hsu calls the "age of the amygdala," group chats give us the space to engage all the other parts of our brain, a chance to listen and be heard and engage in actual conversation and community-building.
Over time, the micro-communities of group chats develop their own shorthand. There are jokes that reference this thing or that from years and tens of thousands of texts ago, some note that has become part of the thread's shared vernacular. Sometimes, the jokes can stretch a touch too far, seeping into the real world, as was the case when one of my group chats incorporated as an LLC earlier this year. Why? Because it was hilarious. At least it was to us.
The chats also codify their own social strata. There's the person who shares the best memes; the person who always takes the joke one text too far; the boomer who types in all caps, uses proper punctuation, and signs their name to the text. Me? I'm the guy who feels like he has to like every meme shared in our threads.
Group chats can become overwhelming, of course, especially as they creep into other apps and especially as they often duplicate participants. But when you think of them as a conduit by which we stay connected to our favorite people, to laugh as though we were all crowded into a booth at the local bar together, or even to learn and develop relationships with people we don't know that well, it's hard to hate on the group chat.
(Not to mention the fact that you can, you know, just leave group chats, as my father often does from our family thread.)
It's time for us all to embrace the ping. And if you can't, learn how to mute your phone, you Luddite. But like America's interstate system or the number of times you can wear jeans before washing them, there have to be rules. What was once the Wild West of interpersonal communication is now becoming the Tucson your parents are thinking of retiring to. And even Tucson has rules.
The following rules have been crowdsourced from my own group chats. They work for any group. Follow them religiously if you don't want to become the next Sam Bankman-Fried. Also, try and avoid creating a multibillion-dollar fake-money fraud scheme.
🚨🚨🚨The rules apply to consenting adults only. For example, a recent Washington Post story on the unwritten rules of teen group chats warns, "Don't say anything you wouldn't want screenshotted." This is sage advice for the social barbarism of high school. This is terrible advice for adults, and, if followed, would maybe keep you out of trouble but would definitively neuter the fun and intimacy of the group chat.
The official rules of the group chat
1. The perfect group chat size is six people. Don't let it exceed 12.
A group chat is like a table at a restaurant. Six makes for freewheeling conversation over candlelight where everyone can feel like they have an equal stake. It also gives everyone a chance to step back if they're not feeling it that day. Beyond eight, chatter becomes more and more rowdy, performative, and splintered. Also, a group chat's vitality is inversely proportional to the number of lurkers in the chat, and more people always means more lurkers.
2. Mute group chats with more than 12 people.
For both your psyche and for the greater good. The texts aren't going anywhere.
3. Don't talk about the group chat outside the group chat.
Just as you should never comment on someone's Instagram post IRL, this rule doesn't apply if you're in the presence of the person whose exclusion from the chat is the very meta reason for the chat's existence in the first place. In which case, you should only talk about the chat in front of them. And be sure to mention, "Oh, it's from our group chat. You wouldn't get it."
4. Your level of activity in a group is inversely proportional to your susceptibility to a side chat that doesn't include you. But the same is true if you're too active.
In other words, if you only lurk and never chime in or if you dominate the conversation at all hours, you only have yourself to blame if you're not part of a breakout chat. Grow up, Peter Pan.
5. Additions to the group chat must be approved unanimously.
And you must ask someone before adding them to an existing group chat.
6. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy.
The lines between work and life are blurred enough on Slack, email, and every other app. Spare the group chat work talk on the weekends.
7. Never tweet. Share it in the group chat.
You'll get more engagement, you'll keep the blast zone of your embarrassment contained, and you'll keep your job.
8. Always make fun of the person with the green bubble.
Android users, you signed up for this.
9. The group should get along IRL.
More or less. We all know how old friends can be.
10. Speaking of, two friends in an argument with each other in a chat have a maximum of four insults each to lob at one another.
After that, you're ruining the vibe. Take it to one-on-one.
11. Limit yourself to sharing no more than four memes, reels, or gifs consecutively.
Anything more and you can't expect anyone to watch them all, and you sound like a bot.
12. Maslow's hierarchy of needs applies to reactions in the group chat.
In the pyramid of satisfying reactions, a response that acknowledges and empathizes with the text and expands on the conversation with a follow-up question or related anecdote is self-actualized, which is better than a joke reaction (esteem need) is better than an emoji reaction (love and belonging need) is better than reading it and not reacting at all (safety and security need) is better than an iMessage reaction (physiological need).
13. Never respond with "ha."
It's one of the most passive-aggressive texts a person can send. If you're thinking of texting "ha," add at least one "ha" to it, even if your heart's not in it, and take a walk. Conversely, anything beyond four "ha's" makes it sound like you're laughing at them ironically.
14. Even if every single member of the group is in one place, such as a wedding, you are still expected to communicate primarily via the group chat.
Why? Because this is how we communicate now.
15. Have at least one group chat that serves as an extension of your consciousness, a safe space for your and your friend's superego, ego, and especially your id.
As The New York Times reporter Astead Herndon once tweeted, "the key to every group chat is mutually assured destruction."
16. Respond to what you want to, when you want to. But there's a 48-hour grace period to respond.
Unless you're the rare person in the chat who never responds but kills when you do. In that case, you may fire when ready.
17. Never, ever, ever join a crypto group chat.
Michael Venutolo-Mantovani has written for The New York Times, National Geographic, Condé Nast Traveler, Wired, and many others. He lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and their two children.