I analysed 20 years of my chats

I analysed 20 years of my chats(drobinin.com)

71 points by valzevul 7 hours ago | 14 comments

Topgamer7 39 minutes ago |

I envy you that you manage to keep meaningful contact with dozens to hundreds of people.

p2detar 23 minutes ago | |

But they don’t, or? From the article:

> 15 close friends, 50 regular contacts, 150 active acquaintances

To me meaningful is just the 15, and 15 close friends is a lot nowadays. Of all the people I know, there’s probably one person that gets close to this and they have a bit of a unstable personality. I don’t think OP‘s numbers are off, but I’m not sure what they mean by active. Is it just online chat, is it grab a beer on a Friday. To me it’s mostly the second. I find it highly subjective.

NDlurker 2 hours ago |

I wanted to do this so bad back in like 2009. I archived MSN messenger chats and my texts and everything and I figured sometime in the future I'd be able to analyze them and maybe even train a chat bot to imitate me. But over the years I lost hard drives and cell phones and accidentally deleted stuff and yeah it didn't happen. Very cool this guy was able to do it

Nition 1 hour ago | |

I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.

hackboyfly 1 minute ago | | |

This made me laugh out loud.

johntash 53 minutes ago | | |

Sometimes I feel bad that I lost years of chat history from then too, but you made me realize that might be a good thing.

Cider9986 2 hours ago |

I mostly text on Signal with disappearing messages so I wouldn't be able to do this. Most people are fine with disappearing messages at 4 weeks, but a few people like to keep their chats forever.

saligne 1 hour ago | |

there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.

dwedge 19 minutes ago | | |

I'd be pretty angry if I found out someone I chatted to on Signal was running a service to workaround my message expiry choice and archive my messages. And breaking that trust just to run it through an LLM?

valzevul 1 hour ago | |

Do you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.

Cider9986 1 hour ago | | |

Yeah I use NotesNook for big notes or projects.

I also use the Note to Self which is built into Signal and appears just like any other conversation. I use that for temporary stuff like addresses and keep it clean.

danielpardo 31 minutes ago |

I would like to do something similar, but I lost a lot of whatsapp historical chats switching phones...

Don't think there is a way to recover that.. right?

dwedge 22 minutes ago | |

If you configured e2e encryption beforehand and know the key, you might get lucky with the backup files on your old phone

defenestrated 18 minutes ago | |

Do you still have those phones/Android files?

dwedge 21 minutes ago |

Damn this is a nice reminder that even private chats I sent to someone else 10 years ago aren't safe from being harvested by AI