There’s a problem at parties where there’ll be a good, high-context conversation happening, and then one-too-many-people join, and then the conversation suddenly dies.
Sometimes this is fine, but other times it’s quite sad.
Things I think might help:
If you’re an existing conversation participant:
Actively try to keep the conversation small. The upper limit is 5, 3-4 is better. If someone looks like they want to join, smile warmly and say “hey, sorry we’re kinda in a high context conversation right now. Listening is fine but probably don’t join.”
If you do want to let a newcomer join in, don’t try to get them up to speed (I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that actually work). Instead, say “this is high context so we’re not gonna repeat the earlier bits, maybe wait to join in until you’ve listened enough to understand the overall context”, and then quickly get back to the conversation before you lose the Flow.
If you want to join a conversation:
If there are already 5 people, sorry, it’s probably too late. Listen if you find it interesting, but if you actively join you’ll probably just kill the conversation.
Give them the opportunity to gracefully keep the conversation small if they choose. (say something like “hey can I join? It sounds like maybe a high context conversation, no worries if you wanna keep it small.”)
Listen for longer before joining. Don’t just wait till you understand the current topic – try to understand the overall vibe, and what previous topics might be informing the current one. Try to get a sense of what each current participant is getting out the conversation. When you do join, do so in a small way that gives them affordance to shift back to an earlier topic if your new contribution turned out to be not-actually-on-topic.
physically separate the group. Go into another room or at least corner. Signal that you’re not seeking additional participants.
When you notice this, make it explicit—“I’m really enjoying the depth of this conversation, should we move into the lounge for a brandy and a little more quiet?”
Admit (to yourself) that others may feel excluded, because they are. At many gatherings, such discussions/situations are time-bound and really can’t last more than 10-45 minutes. The only solution is to have more frequent, smaller gatherings.
Get good at involved listening—it’s different than 1:1 active listening, but has similar goals: don’t inject any ideas, but do give signals that you’re following and supporting. This is at least 80% as enjoyable as active participation, and doesn’t break the flow when you join a clique in progress.
I wonder what analogs there are to online conversations. I suspect there’s a lot of similarity for synchronous chats—too many people make it impossible to follow. For threaded, async discussions, the limits are probably much larger.
[EDIT, was intended as a response to Raemon, not Dagon.]
Maybe it’s the way you phrase the responses. But as described, I get the impression that this norm would mainly work for relatively extroverted persons with low rejection sensitivity.
I’d be much less likely to ever try to join a discussion (and would tend to not attend events with such a norm). But maybe there’s a way to avoid this, both from “my side” and “yours”.
Hmm, seems like important feedback. I had specifically been trying to phrase the responses in a way that addressed this specific problem. Sounds like it didn’t work.
There is some intrinsic rejection going on here, which probably no amount of kind wording can alleviate for a rejection-sensitive person.
For my “sorry, we’re keeping the convo small” bit, I suggested:
smile warmly and say “hey, sorry we’re kinda in a high context conversation right now. Listening is fine but probably don’t join.”
The Smile Warmly part was meant to be a pretty active ingredient, helping to reassure them it isn’t personal.
Another thing that seems pretty important, is that this applies to all newcomers, even your friends and High Status People. (i.e. hopefully if Anxious Alex gets turned away, but later sees High Status Bob also get turned away, they get reassured a bit that this wasn’t about them)
I wonder what analogs there are to online conversations. I suspect there’s a lot of similarity for synchronous chats—too many people make it impossible to follow. For threaded, async discussions, the limits are probably much larger.
FYI, the actual motivating example here was at a party in gather.town, (formerly online.town, formerly town.siempre), which has much more typical “party” dynamics. (i.e people can wander around an online world and video chat with people nearby).
In this case there were actually some additional complexities – I had joined a conversation relatively late, I did lurk for quite awhile, and wait for the current set of topics to die down completely before introducing a new one. And then the conversation took a turn that I was really excited by, and at least 1-2 other people were interested in, but it wasn’t obvious to me that it was interesting to everyone else (I think ~5 people involved total?)
And then a new person came in, and asked what we were talking about and someone filled them in… …and then immediately the conversation ended. And in this case I don’t know if the issue was more like “the newcomer killed the conversation” or “the convo actually had roughly reached it’s natural end, and/or other people weren’t that interested in the first place.”
But, from my own perspective, the conversation had just finished covering all the obvious background concepts that would be required for the “real” conversation to begin, and I was hoping to actually Make Real Progress on a complex concept.
So, I dunno if this counted as “an interesting conversation” yet, and unfortunately the act of asking the question “hey, do we want to continue diving deep into this, or wrap up and transition into some other convo?” also kinda kills the conversation. Conversations are so god damn fragile.
What I really wished was that everyone already had common knowledge of the meta-concept, wherein:
Party conversations are particularly fragile
Bringing a newcomer up to speed is usually costly if the conversation is doing anything deep
We might or might not want to continue delving into the current convo (but we don’t currently have common knowledge of this in either direction)
And if everyone (newcomer included) had those concepts, and new everyone had those concepts, then I feel like I could have asked more gracefully “hey, I’m kinda interested in continuing to hash out some ideas here. Are people up for taking this high context”, and had people give their honest answer.
I hosted an online-party using zoom breakout rooms a few weeks ago and ran into similar problems.
Half-way through the party I noticed people were clustering in suboptimal size conversations and bringing high-context conversations to a stop, so I actually brought everybody backed to the lobby then randomly assigned them to groups of 2 or 3 - and when I checked 10 minutes later everyone was in the same two rooms again with groups of 8 − 10 people.
AFAICT this was status/feelings driven—there were a few people at the party who were either existing high-status to the participants, or who were very charismatic, and everyone wanted to be in the same conversation as them.
I think norm-setting around this is very hard, because it’s natural to want to be around high-status and charismatic people, and it’s also natural to want to participate in a conversation you’re listening to.
I’m going to try to add your suggestions to the top of the shared google doc next time I host one of these and see how it goes.
Agreed with the status/feelings cause. And I’m not 100% sure the solution is “prevent people from doing the thing they instinctively want to do” (especially “all the time.”)
My current guess is “let people crowd around the charismatic/and/or/interesting people, but treat it more like a panel discussion or fireside chat, like you might have at a conference, where mostly 2-3 people are talking and everyone else is more formally ‘audience.’”
But doing that all the time would also be kinda bad in different ways.
In this case… you might actually be able to fix this with technology? Can you literally put room-caps on the rooms, so if someone wants to be the 4th or 6th person in a room they… just… can’t?
There’s a problem at parties where there’ll be a good, high-context conversation happening, and then one-too-many-people join, and then the conversation suddenly dies.
Sometimes this is fine, but other times it’s quite sad.
Things I think might help:
If you’re an existing conversation participant:
Actively try to keep the conversation small. The upper limit is 5, 3-4 is better. If someone looks like they want to join, smile warmly and say “hey, sorry we’re kinda in a high context conversation right now. Listening is fine but probably don’t join.”
If you do want to let a newcomer join in, don’t try to get them up to speed (I don’t know if I’ve ever seen that actually work). Instead, say “this is high context so we’re not gonna repeat the earlier bits, maybe wait to join in until you’ve listened enough to understand the overall context”, and then quickly get back to the conversation before you lose the Flow.
If you want to join a conversation:
If there are already 5 people, sorry, it’s probably too late. Listen if you find it interesting, but if you actively join you’ll probably just kill the conversation.
Give them the opportunity to gracefully keep the conversation small if they choose. (say something like “hey can I join? It sounds like maybe a high context conversation, no worries if you wanna keep it small.”)
Listen for longer before joining. Don’t just wait till you understand the current topic – try to understand the overall vibe, and what previous topics might be informing the current one. Try to get a sense of what each current participant is getting out the conversation. When you do join, do so in a small way that gives them affordance to shift back to an earlier topic if your new contribution turned out to be not-actually-on-topic.
+lots. Some techniques:
physically separate the group. Go into another room or at least corner. Signal that you’re not seeking additional participants.
When you notice this, make it explicit—“I’m really enjoying the depth of this conversation, should we move into the lounge for a brandy and a little more quiet?”
Admit (to yourself) that others may feel excluded, because they are. At many gatherings, such discussions/situations are time-bound and really can’t last more than 10-45 minutes. The only solution is to have more frequent, smaller gatherings.
Get good at involved listening—it’s different than 1:1 active listening, but has similar goals: don’t inject any ideas, but do give signals that you’re following and supporting. This is at least 80% as enjoyable as active participation, and doesn’t break the flow when you join a clique in progress.
I wonder what analogs there are to online conversations. I suspect there’s a lot of similarity for synchronous chats—too many people make it impossible to follow. For threaded, async discussions, the limits are probably much larger.
[EDIT, was intended as a response to Raemon, not Dagon.]
Maybe it’s the way you phrase the responses. But as described, I get the impression that this norm would mainly work for relatively extroverted persons with low rejection sensitivity.
I’d be much less likely to ever try to join a discussion (and would tend to not attend events with such a norm). But maybe there’s a way to avoid this, both from “my side” and “yours”.
Hmm, seems like important feedback. I had specifically been trying to phrase the responses in a way that addressed this specific problem. Sounds like it didn’t work.
There is some intrinsic rejection going on here, which probably no amount of kind wording can alleviate for a rejection-sensitive person.
For my “sorry, we’re keeping the convo small” bit, I suggested:
The Smile Warmly part was meant to be a pretty active ingredient, helping to reassure them it isn’t personal.
Another thing that seems pretty important, is that this applies to all newcomers, even your friends and High Status People. (i.e. hopefully if Anxious Alex gets turned away, but later sees High Status Bob also get turned away, they get reassured a bit that this wasn’t about them)
FYI, the actual motivating example here was at a party in gather.town, (formerly online.town, formerly town.siempre), which has much more typical “party” dynamics. (i.e people can wander around an online world and video chat with people nearby).
In this case there were actually some additional complexities – I had joined a conversation relatively late, I did lurk for quite awhile, and wait for the current set of topics to die down completely before introducing a new one. And then the conversation took a turn that I was really excited by, and at least 1-2 other people were interested in, but it wasn’t obvious to me that it was interesting to everyone else (I think ~5 people involved total?)
And then a new person came in, and asked what we were talking about and someone filled them in… …and then immediately the conversation ended. And in this case I don’t know if the issue was more like “the newcomer killed the conversation” or “the convo actually had roughly reached it’s natural end, and/or other people weren’t that interested in the first place.”
But, from my own perspective, the conversation had just finished covering all the obvious background concepts that would be required for the “real” conversation to begin, and I was hoping to actually Make Real Progress on a complex concept.
So, I dunno if this counted as “an interesting conversation” yet, and unfortunately the act of asking the question “hey, do we want to continue diving deep into this, or wrap up and transition into some other convo?” also kinda kills the conversation. Conversations are so god damn fragile.
What I really wished was that everyone already had common knowledge of the meta-concept, wherein:
Party conversations are particularly fragile
Bringing a newcomer up to speed is usually costly if the conversation is doing anything deep
We might or might not want to continue delving into the current convo (but we don’t currently have common knowledge of this in either direction)
And if everyone (newcomer included) had those concepts, and new everyone had those concepts, then I feel like I could have asked more gracefully “hey, I’m kinda interested in continuing to hash out some ideas here. Are people up for taking this high context”, and had people give their honest answer.
I hosted an online-party using zoom breakout rooms a few weeks ago and ran into similar problems.
Half-way through the party I noticed people were clustering in suboptimal size conversations and bringing high-context conversations to a stop, so I actually brought everybody backed to the lobby then randomly assigned them to groups of 2 or 3 - and when I checked 10 minutes later everyone was in the same two rooms again with groups of 8 − 10 people.
AFAICT this was status/feelings driven—there were a few people at the party who were either existing high-status to the participants, or who were very charismatic, and everyone wanted to be in the same conversation as them.
I think norm-setting around this is very hard, because it’s natural to want to be around high-status and charismatic people, and it’s also natural to want to participate in a conversation you’re listening to.
I’m going to try to add your suggestions to the top of the shared google doc next time I host one of these and see how it goes.
Agreed with the status/feelings cause. And I’m not 100% sure the solution is “prevent people from doing the thing they instinctively want to do” (especially “all the time.”)
My current guess is “let people crowd around the charismatic/and/or/interesting people, but treat it more like a panel discussion or fireside chat, like you might have at a conference, where mostly 2-3 people are talking and everyone else is more formally ‘audience.’”
But doing that all the time would also be kinda bad in different ways.
In this case… you might actually be able to fix this with technology? Can you literally put room-caps on the rooms, so if someone wants to be the 4th or 6th person in a room they… just… can’t?