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| Typing Notifications |
 Title text: Over the years I've decided I'd rather have them on than not, but I'm glad there aren't "has opened a blank note to compose a reply to you" notifications. |
Explanation
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This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: Simple comic, anything missing? Please change this comment when editing this page. Do NOT delete this tag too soon. |
Randall has sent a message on an instant messenger to someone else. The message contains simple questions about a show Randall must have undertaken and he insists in an honest answer. The reader tries several times to give a proper answer, probably changing the text, until giving up and sending a simple kind reply.
Typing notifications are a feature of some instant messaging systems. They let you know when the other person in a conversation is typing and preparing a reply. They may appear in different forms, like the literal text "[Contact] is typing." or often has a answer (possibly a different color) containing three animated dots. They give the sender confidence that their message has been received and is being processed.
When the final response is received it is anodyne "It was great", suggesting that the first two deleted drafts could be far more critical. The fact that you know that a message has been deleted or edited twice provokes you to imagine what the deleted drafts may have contained. The issue with typing notifications that Randall is talking about might also just be the difficulty to interpret them. The distant contact might just have been doing something else at the same time, started typing in the wrong conversation, or corrected a typo, but the typing notifications make it seem like they weren't honest.
In the title text, Randall expresses that he likes to watch when the recipient reacts but he's also happy not to receive that attempt as an empty reply.
Transcript
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This transcript is incomplete. Please help editing it! Thanks. |
- [A sequence of eight panels representing the same conversation in an electronic chat. The header always reads:]
- What did you think of my show? Did you like it? Be honest!
- [The reply area on the first seven panels is empty, but on the 2nd, 3rd, 5th, and 7th the input is activated and showing three dots.]
- [On the last panel the reply area reads:]
- It was great!
- [Caption below the panels:]
- My least favorite aspect of typing notifications
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