Back to topic – gym memberships are a bundle. They bundle together the ability to use the gym over a long contiguous block of time. It doesn’t matter whether you want to go once a week or every day, in most gyms you have no choice but to buy the full bundle.
In some gyms (such as the one I was a member of before the lockdown started), there was more than the opportunity to use the equipment that was thrown into the bundle – the gym conducted lots of group classes every day. The option to join one of these classes (or maybe more – I never tried) was also bundled into the membership. Similarly, in an earlier gym I was a member of, the membership came bundled with the option to use squash courts, and use the gym bar.
The bundling made sense – cognitively it was easy on the members. The advantage of bundling is that marginal costs are kept at zero, which means mental accounting becomes far easier. Should I go to the gym today? I only need to think about whether I have the time and want the exercise. The decision is not complicated by money that I might have to spend. Similarly, should I join the class or just lift weights? Again depends upon mood and not on whether I need to pay anything for anything.
In any case, the pandemic and lockdown completely ruined the bundle. A lot of the options that were part of the bundle were forced to expire un-exercised since the gym was mandated to be closed (it’s unclear if they’re giving us any extensions of memberships once they restart this week).
Moreover, once the gyms restart (while they have been allowed to start on Wednesday, so far there’s been no communication from my gym on when they’re actually starting), they are likely to want to ensure some sort of social distancing. This means that the sort of bundles that they would sell earlier will be very hard to sustain.
Earlier, the bundle had both the option to attend the rather crowded 6:30 am class or the rather empty 9:30 am class. There was no differential pricing, and for good reason – mental costs were kept low. Now, in case the gym decides that the number of people per class needs to be capped (mgiht have to do that to ensure social distancing), the bundle will become unworkable.
It will be as if the members who can only attend the rather crowded 6:30 am class and no other class are part of the same chit fund, betting against each other so that they can attend their favourite class. From the gym’s point of view, this is not workable.
While gyms worldwide have for long benefited from extreme bundling (with massive discounts for long-term contracts), with the understanding that people won’t utilise a large portion of that bundle, the post-pandemic era that restricts the number of people who can attend the gym at the same time might cause this model to unravel.
It will be interesting to see how the gym pricing models evolve. I liked this model that a gym my wife briefly attended follows – which was like the mobile phone plans of olden days. For a fixed sum, you would be entitled to a certain number of classes that had to be utilised in a certain number of days (eg. 6 classes in a month). And then you would have to book online to book a class and exercise each of these options.
Then again, a lot of gyms belong to what I call the “passion economy” – people who are in business because they are passionate about something rather than because they are good at business. So I don’t know how rational they will be with their pricing.
I started writing this blog, or its predecessor, in 2004. For nine years I made zero money off it. In fact, in 2008, after I moved to this website, I started paying money to run this blog, in terms of an annual domain name and hosting fee.
And then in 2013, I became part of a “big bundle”, as Mint offered me the opportunity to write for them. I had a contract to write at least three pieces a month around a particular topic, in return for which I would be paid a reasonable sum of money.
That sum of money was “reasonable” enough that it sort of provided me “tenure” until 2017, when I moved to London (I continued to write for Mint, and get paid, but the money wasn’t enough for “tenure” in London where expenses were higher). The Mint editor changed in early 2018, and the tenure ended in late 2018. I briefly got another tenure with the same editor at his new digs in 2019, but I decided to end that after a few months.
(By tenure, I mean steady stable income out of work that doesn’t take too much of my time. So I never had to struggle for basic expenses and every business deal was a bonus. Wonderful times)
In other words, I built my reputation as a writer by myself, writing this blog (and its predecessor), and then monetised it by joining a large bundle.
Recent trends in the media seem to be reversing the process. Recently, for example, Andrew Sullivan, a journalist with the New York magazine, quit his job and started his own newsletter. And this seems to be the part of a larger trend.
Columnist Matt Taibbi left Rolling Stone in April to write on Substack full time. Andrew Sullivan did the same last week, leaving New York Magazine to resurrect his blog the Dish. Joan Niesen, a Sports Illustrated staff writer who was laid off in October, shortly after the magazine’s sale, started a free Substack newsletter last week.
Essentially, journalists who made their names as being part of big bundles, are leaving these bundles and instead trying to monetise on their own platforms. This is exactly the opposite of the route that I, and many other bloggers of the 2000s wave, took – build reputation independently and monetise as part of a bundle.
At the outset, I’m sceptical about lifelong bundlers leaving their bundles. Essentially, once you’ve gotten used to working as part of a large professional setup, you would have started taking a large number of things for granted, and replicating those things are not going to be easy once you go indie.
As a writer, for example, who will edit your copy? Who will make and design your graphics? Who will write your headlines? Who will tell you lots to write about? While you might have experience as a journalist and be very good at your core job, being part of an institution means that you will find it very difficult to do everything by yourself (I THINK I’ve written something on these lines for non-journalism jobs as well, but I can’t be bothered to find that post now. I actually searched for it and found that like an idiot I’d written it on LinkedIn, and now I can‘t find it).
Moreover, people will face “subscription fatigue”, and won’t want to subscribe to too many individual writers. A case can be made for bundling again (get a bunch of writers who write about sort of complementary stuff, and then bundle their newsletters for an integrated subscription). (after all, all disruption is about either bundling or unbundling).
What connects South Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh? All these regions were, at some point of time or the other, hailed for their deft handling of the covid-19 crisis.
Some of them, such as Vietnam and Singapore have continued to do well. New Zealand has also done rather well, and it continues to keep its border closed. However, shit has hit the fan in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh in terms of number of cases. All the diligence in containment earlier seems to be of no use now, only delaying the inevitable.
So what happened?
Essentially the way you deal with a leak and the way you do with a deluge are vastly different.
When you have a leak, you know that there is a good chance that you can try to stem it. You first put in some temporary measure to slow it down so that the hole doesn’t become bigger, and then you find something – a rubber patch, or some M-seal, or a piece of string, or some plaster (or a combination of these) to plug the leak.
Once the leak has been plugged you are safe. There are no more leaks in the foreseeable future. The damage is likely to have been limited.
When the flow of water from the damaged source is too heavy, though, stemming leaks just doesn’t work. You can try to stem it, but the pressure is so intense that the water finds its way around it. And the more the effort you put in stemming, the more the likelihood that when the water breaks through it is going to damage you.
When you are dealing with a deluge, the optimal strategy is to not try and stop the deluge. That is usually futile. The focus needs to be on mitigation and management – take the deluge as a given, and that some damage is guaranteed, and try to figure out how best you are going to limit the damage to the extent possible.
Some states in India, such as Karnataka or Kerala or Andhra Pradesh, had been blessed with “thin inlet pipes” in terms of the covid-19 virus. The initial case loads in these states was low, so a strategy of a lockdown (which was national anyways) combined with strong contact tracing and testing kept the disease under wraps. The “models” of these states were lauded at one time or another.
so my theory of Bangalore having gotten initially lucky with a "thin inlet pipe" worked I guess.
As soon as the inlet pipe became thick, we lost it.
And then inter-state borders opened up. As people streamed in from neighbouring states that had not been blessed by thin inlet pipes, the pipes into these hitherto thick states became thick. Not realising this happened, these states continued with their old “trace and test” strategy. It doesn’t seem to be helping.
Cases are exploding in these states. And the same old strategy is being persisted with. Bangalore even did a week-long lockdown that ended on Tuesday, putting many livelihoods at risk.
I have come to firmly believe that there are no “good strategies” in terms of combating the disease unless strict border controls can be maintained. Anything any government does in terms of tracing and testing and locking down will only slow the inevitable – it doesn’t make the place safe from the disease itself.
The only purpose of containment measures, I have come to believe, is to spread out the severe cases over time, so that hospitals are not overwhelmed, and those who can be helped by medical care can get that help.
In fact, if you remember, this was the original meaning of “flattening the curve”. Over time, people have come up with their own definitions of the phrase, looking at the number of new cases, number of cases, number of deaths and what not.
The original purpose of lockdown was to let the infection spread in a controlled manner, not to prevent the spread of the disease altogether (which is near-impossible). We would do well to remember that.
In any case, I have a pretty bad track record in terms of reading sentences that don’t have punctuation. I can think of two examples right away.
Firstly, my school diary was filled with quotes from Sri Aurobindo and “The Mother“. By turns, we would have to say “thought for the day” in the school assembly. And we had a reliable way of finding such thoughts – just look in the diary and spout out the nuggets.
One of those went:
Always do what you know to be the best even if it the most difficult thing to do.
Yes, I remember that. Because I had spouted this not once but twice. Now, this is a long sentence without any punctuation. How would you read it?
For the longest time I read it like this.
Always do what you know, to be the best, even if it is the most difficult thing to do.
So if there are many things that you can do, and you know one of the things, you do that thing even if it is harder than everything else that you might do (but don’t know how to do).
Clearly that doesn’t make that much sense. It was only when I was about to graduate that I figured that it was actually:
Always do what you know to be the best even if it is the most difficult thing to do.
So there are many things you can do. You know one of them is the “best thing to do”. So even if it is the most difficult thing to do, you do it because you know it is “the best” (not because you “know it the best”).
Another example is from this store near my house. I don’t think the store existed for too long, but it had an interesting and quirky name (in Kannada).
“ellAdEvarakrupe stores“, it said. For the longest time I read it as “ellAdEvara krupe”, or “grace of all gods”. And I thought it was a fascinating name in terms of recognising all religions. And I’ve quoted it many times.
When I was quoting this on Twitter earlier today, I realised that I had got the name of the store all wrong. It’s “ellA dEvarakrupe”, meaning “everything is god’s grace”. It says nothing about which gods are included or excluded, or how many gods there are.
What are your favourite examples of sentences that you’ve misread thanks to the lack of punctuation or other visible sentence markers?
Recently I watched this video that YouTube recommended to me about why orchestras have conductors.
The basic idea is that an orchestra needs a whole lot of coordination, in terms of when to begin and end, when to slow down or speed up, when to move to the next line and so on. And in case there is no conductor, the members of the orchestra need to coordinate among themselves.
This is easy enough when there is a small number of members, so you don’t see bands (for example) needing conductors. However, notice that if the orchestra has to coordinate among themselves, coordination is an problem. By appointing an external conductor whose only job is to conduct and not play, this problem is reduced to an problem.
When I saw this, this took me back to my Investments course in IIMB, where the professor one day introduced what he called the “Sharpe single index model“, which is sort of similar to the CAPM.
Just before learning the Sharpe Single Index Model, we had been learning about Markowitz’s portfolio theory. And then, as he introduced the Sharpe Single Index Model, Vaidya said something to the effect that “instead of knowing so many correlation terms” (which is an problem), “we only need to know the correlation of each stock to the market index” (makes it an problem).
As someone who has studied computer science formally, converting problems to problems is a massive fascination. It is interesting how I connected two such reductions from completely different fields.
In other words, conductors are the “market of the orchestra”.
Every time we have a sort of financial crisis that has something to do with settlement, and collaterals, and weird instruments, people start questioning why more instruments are not traded on exchanges. They cite the example of equities, which world over are exchange traded, centrally settled, and whose markets function rather efficiently.
After the 2008 Financial Crisis, for example, there was a move to take Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to exchanges, rather than letting the market go over the counter (OTC). Every few years, ideas are floated about trading bonds on exchanges (rather than OTC, like they are now), and the blame falls on “greedy bankers who don’t want to let go of control”.
There is an excellent podcast by Bloomberg Odd Lots where Chris White, a former Goldman Sachs banker, talks about how the equity markets went electronic in the 1970s with NASDAQ, and how the “big bang” in the UK markets propelled equities into electronic trading everywhere.
In any case, I think I have the perfect explanation of why bond trading on exchanges hasn’t really taken off. To understand this, let’s look at another market that I discussed extensively in my book – the market for relationships (that chapter has been extracted in Mint).
The market for relationships is in the news thanks to this Netflix documentary called Indian Matchmaking. I started watching it on a whim on Saturday night, and I got so addicted to it that yesterday I postponed my work to late night so that I could finish the show instead.
Marriage can be thought of as a sale of “50% of the rest of your life“, paid for by 50% of the rest of someone else’s life.
There are two ways you can go about it – either “over the counter” (finding a partner by yourself) or “exchange traded” (said exchange could be anything from newspaper classifieds to Tinder to Shaadi.com). Brokers are frequently used in the OTC market – either parents or friends (who set you up) or priests.
The general rule of markets is that the more bespoke (or “weird” or “unusual”) an instrument is, the better the likelihood of finding a match in the OTC markets than on exchanges. The reason is simple – for an exchange to exist, the commodity being traded needs to be a commodity.
Read any literature on agricultural markets, for example, and they all talk about “assaying” and “grading” the commodities. The basic idea is that all goods being traded on a marketplace are close enough substitutes of each other that they can be interchanged for each other.
Equity shares, by definition, are commodities. Equity and index derivatives are commodities as well, easy enough to define. Commodities are, by definition, commodities. Bond futures are commodities, since they can be standardised on a small number of axes. We’ll come to bonds in a bit.
Coming back to relationship markets, the “exchanges” work best if you have very few idiosyncrasies, and can be defined fairly well in terms of a small number of variables. It also helps you to find a partner quicker in case many others in the market have similar attributes as you, which means that the market for “your type of people” becomes “liquid” (this is a recurring theme in my book).
However, in case you are either not easily describable by commonly used variables, or in case there are few others like you in the market, exchanges are likely to work less well for you. Either of these conditions makes you “illiquid”, and it is not a great idea to list an illiquid asset on an exchange.
When you list an illiquid asset on an exchange, unless you are extremely lucky, it is likely to sit there for a long time without being traded (think about “bespoke exchanges” like eBay here, where commodification is not necessary). The longer the asset sits on an exchange, the greater the likelihood that people who come across the asset on the exchange think that “something is wrong with it”.
So if you’re listing it on an exchange, its value will decay exponentially, and unless you are able to trade soon after you have listed it, you are unlikely to get much value for it.
In that sense, if you are “illiquid” for whatever reason (can’t be easily described, or belong to a type that few others in the market belong to), exchanges are not for you. And if you think about each of the characters in Indian Matchmaking who come to Sima aunty, they are illiquid in one way or another.
Aparna has entered the market at 34, and few other women of her age are in the market. Hence illiquid.
Nadia belongs to a small ethnicity, Indian-Guyanese-American, which makes her illiquid.
Pradhyuman has quirky interests (jewelry and fashion), which his parents are trying to suppress as they pass him off a liquid “rich Maadu boy”. Quirky interests mean he’s not easily describable. Hence illiquid.
Vyasar, by Indian-American standards, doesn’t have a great job. So not too many others like him. Illiquid, even before you take his family situation into account.
Ankita is professionally ambitious. Few of those women in the Indian arranged marriage market. Illiquid.
Rupam is divorced with a child. Might be liquid by conventional American markets, but illiquid in an Indian context. And she is, rather inexplicably, going the Indian way despite being American.
Akshay is possibly the most liquid (characterless except for an overly-dominating mom), and maybe that’s why he’s shown getting engaged.
All of these people will be wasting themselves listing themselves on exchanges. And so they come to a matchmaker. Now, Sima Auntie is both a broker and a clearinghouse (refer to Chapter 3 of my book 😛). She helps find matches for people, but only matches within her own inventory (though she decided Ankita has no matches at all in her own inventory, so connected her with another broker-clearinghouse).
This makes it hard – first of all you have illiquid assets, and you are trying to fulfil them within limited inventory. This is why she is repeatedly showing saying that her candidates need to “compromise” (something that seems to have triggered a lot of viewers). By compromise, she is saying that these people are so illiquid that in case they need to get a deal in her little exchange, they need to be willing to accept an “illiquidity discount” in order to get a trade.
Back to bonds, why is trading them on an exchange so difficult? Because each bond is so idiosyncratic. There is the issuer, the exact date of expiry and the coupon, and occasionally some weird derivatives tacked on. The likelihood that you might find someone quickly enough to take the other side of such a deal is minuscule, so if you were to list your bond on an exchange, its value would drop significantly (by being continuously listed) before you could find a counterparty.
Hence, people trade this uncertain discount to a certain discount, by trading their bonds with market makers (investment banks) who are willing to take the other side of the deal immediately.
Unfortunately, market making is not a viable strategy when it comes to relationship markets. So what do you do if you can either be not defined easily in a few parameters, or if there are few others like you in the arranged marriage market? You basically go Over The Counter. Ditch the market and find someone for yourself, or ask people you know to set you up. Or hire a matrimonial advisor who will tell you what to do.
If this doesn’t convince you on why matchmakers are important, then may be you should read what my other half has to say. If she’s the better half or not, you figure.
One of the great philosophical battles of our times is the “cancel culture“. This culture dictates that if you have ever done something reprehensible in the past (I’m sure in my case you can find lots of incriminating blogposts and tweets), then you deserve to be “cancelled”.
This is how it works, according to Vox:
A celebrity or other public figure does or says something offensive. A public backlash, often fueled by politically progressive social media, ensues. Then come the calls to cancel the person — that is, to effectively end their career or revoke their cultural cachet, whether through boycotts of their work or disciplinary action from an employer.
In 2019 alone, the list of people who’ve faced being canceled included alleged sexual predators like R. Kelly; entertainers like Kanye West, Scarlett Johansson, and Gina Rodriguez, who all had offensive foot-in-mouth moments; and comedians like Kevin Hartand Shane Gillis, who each faced public backlash after social media users unearthed homophobic and racist jokes they’d made in the past.
In any case, recently the New York Post found that some ancestors of their great city rivals New York Times were slaveholders and supported the confederacy.
While it is pretty certain that any white American who had an ancestor who lived in the US in the early 1800s is likely to be the descendent of slaveholders, maybe this is good reason enough to “cancel the New York Times”?
Anyway the point of this post can be seen in the replies to the tweet, and you can think of the sole purpose of this post being to save that idea for posterity.
Essentially, New York Times is a subscription-based newspaper, and a more conventional meaning of “cancel” applies to it – you can simply cancel your subscription. I’m a subscriber, having taken advantage of a ?25 per week offer they ran a few months back (this is less than half of what I pay for a print edition of the Times of India; that is how zero marginal cost products work).
Now, through my twitter timeline I’ve been seeing several people make a case that the NYT is not what it used to be, and that it is a partisan rag now, and that it is not worth subscribing to, and hence deserves to be (in the conventional sense) cancelled.
Every time I come across such an argument I briefly consider cancelling my NYT subscription and then I think “what the hell, it’s just ?25 per week. The option value of a few good articles here and there is worth more than that”, and I move on.
I have mentally set myself to cancel my subscription in March next year, when my cheap offer ends, but until then, as far as I’m concerned the “NYT is too cheap to be cancelled”.
So that led to this thought – you can only be cancelled if you are not “cheap”. As long as you are cheap enough, people will see no benefit in cancelling you.
Now I’m reminded of the time when at the New Year’s Eve celebrations, I got the “cheap guy of the year” award for 2004 at IIM Bangalore. I suppose that’s insurance enough against getting cancelled?
Recently I tried out Instagram Reels, just to see what the big deal about it is. The first impression wasn’t great. My feed was filled with famous people (KL Rahul was there, along with some bollywood actresses), doing supposedly funny things. Compared to the little I had seen of TikTok (I had the app installed for a day last year), this was barely funny.
In fact, from my first impression it seems like Instagram Reels is a sort of bastard child of TikTok and Quibi (I took a 90 day trial of Quibi and uninstalled after a month, having used it 2-3 times and got bored each time). There is already a “prior reputation network”, based on people’s followers on the main Instagram product. And Reels takes off on this.
This means that for a new person coming into this supposedly new social network, the barriers to entry to getting more followers is rather high. They need to compete with people who already have built their reputations elsewhere (either on the Instagram main product, or in the case of someone like KL Rahul, completely offline).
I was reading this blogpost yesterday that compared and contrasted social networking in the 2000s (blogs) with that of the 2010s (twitter). It’s a nice blogpost, though I should mention that it sort of confirms my biases since I sort of built my reputation using my blog in the late 2000s.
That post makes the same point – blogs created their own reputation networks, while twitter leverages people’s reputations from elsewhere.
The existence of the blue checks points to the way in which the barriers that a new blogger faced entering a community was far lower than is currently the case on twitter. The start-up costs of blogging were higher, but once somebody integrated themselves into a community and began writing, they were judged on the quality of that writing alone. Very little attention was paid to who that person was outside of the blogosphere. While some prominent and well known individuals blogged, there was nothing like the “blue checks” we see on twitter today. It is not hard to understand why this is. Twitter is an undifferentiated mass of writhing souls trying to inflict their angry opinions on the earth. Figuring out who to listen to in this twist of two-sentences is difficult. We use a tweeter’s offline affiliations to separate the wheat and the chaff.
For the longest time, I refrained from putting my real name on this blog (though it was easy enough to triangulate my identity based on all the things I’d written here). This was to create a sort of plausible deniability in case some employer somewhere got pissed off with what I was writing.
Most of the blogosphere was similarly pseudonymous (or even anonymous). A lot of people I got to know through their blogging, I learnt about them from their writing before I could know anything else about them (that came from their “offline lives”). Reputation outside the blogosphere didn’t matter – your standing as a blogger depended on the quality of blogposts, and comments on other people’s blogposts only.
It is similar with TikTok – it’s “extreme machine learning” means that people’s reputations outside the network don’t matter in terms of people’s following on the network, and how likely they are to appear in people’s feeds. Instead, all that matters is the quality of the content on the platform, based (in TikTok’s case) on user engagement on the platform.
So as we look for an alternative to replace TikTok, given that the Chinese Communist Party seems to be able to get supposedly confidential data from it, we need to remember that we need a “fresh network”, or a “credential free” network.
Instagram has done something it’s good at, which is copying. However, given that it relies on existing credentials, Reels will never have the same experience as TikTok. Neither will any other similar product created from an existing social network. What we need is something that can create its own reputation network, bottom up.
Then again, blogging was based on an open platform so it was easy for people to build their networks. With something like TikTok relying heavily on network effects and algorithmic curation, I don’t know if such a thing can happen there.
About 10 days back I decided that the number of covid-19 positive cases in Bangalore was high enough to recalibrate my risk levels. So I decided I’m not going to go to “indoor shops” (where you have to step inside the shop) any more.
Instead, as much as possible I would buy from “over the counter” shops (where you don’t have to step inside). This way, I would avoid being indoors, and as long as I’m outdoors (and wearing a mask) when I’m out of homeI should be reasonably safe.
However, over the years we have come to need a lot of things that at least in an Indian context can be classified as “long tail”. Over the last three months I’ve been buying them from the large format Namdhari store close to home. Now, that’s a large airconditioned shop which my new risk levels don’t allow me to go to. So I decided to order from their website.
Now, Namdhari is a classic “omnichannel retail” (the phrase was told to me by one of the guys who helped set it up). There is no warehouse – all customer orders are fulfilled from stores. You could think of it like calling your local shop and asking for delivery.
As you can imagine, this can lead to insane inventory issues, especially for a shop like Namdhari’s that specialises in long tail stuff. It is pretty impossible for a store to reconcile how much stock is there in the store with the website (even with perfect technology, you’ll miss out on what is there in people’s (physical) charts).
There is also the issue of prioritisation of customers that they are kept in the dark about. If the shop has a limited inventory of any item (and with long tail stuff, even a small spike in demand can make inventory very limited), how does it allocate it between people who have trudged all the way to the store and those who have prepaid for it on the website?
I wasn’t that surprised, I guess, when half the items that I had ordered failed to arrive. The delivery guy told me that the rest of my money would get refunded.
I wondered why they wouldn’t try to fulfil my order the next day instead. This brings me to my next grouse – there is no real reasons sometimes to provide same day delivery. If you offer next day delivery then you know tomorrow delivery volumes beforehand, and it will be easy for you to stock up. These guys had this process, it seems, where you have to order for the same day and if the thing runs out you don’t get it at all.
In any case, three days after my half-fulfilled order had been delivered I got a mail that refund had been initiated for the items I had ordered but hadn’t arrived.
It was like writing a cheque. Cheques are inefficient because between the time it is written and encashed, neither the giver nor the receiver has access to the funds (online transfer such as IMPS, on the other hand, ensures that the money is in either the giver or receiver’s account at all points in time).
So my order which had been partially fulfilled was in a similar trishanku state – I didn’t know if it would arrive or if I should order the same items from elsewhere. In case I waited I would have the risk of getting the stuff even later (since I’d delay order from elsewhere).
It was only after it failed to arrive on Wednesday (and I got the mail) that I was able to place an order from elsewhere. Hopefully this one won’t get into trishanku state as well.
There was a tiny controversy on one WhatsApp group I’m part of. This is a “sparse” WhatsApp group, which means there aren’t too many messages sent. Only around 1000 in nearly 5 years (you’ll soon know how I got that number).
And this morning I wake up to find 42 messages (many members of the group are in the US). Some of them I understood and some I didn’t. So the gossip-monger I am (hey, remember that Yuval Noah Harari thinks gossip is the basis of human civilisation?), I opened up half a dozen backchannel chats.
Like the six blind men of Indostan, these chats helped me construct a picture of what had happened. My domain knowledge had gotten enhanced. However, there was one message that had made a deep impression on me – that claimed that some people were monopolising whatever little conversation there was on that group.
I HAD to test that hypothesis.
The jobless guy that I am, I figured out how to export a chat from WhatsApp. With iOS, it’s rather easy. Go to the info page of a chat or a group, and near “delete chat/group”, you see “export chat/group”. If you say you don’t want media (like I did), you get a text file (I airdropped mine immediately into my Mac).
The formatting of the WhatsApp export file is rather clean, making it easy to parse. The date is in square brackets. The sender’s name (or number, if they’re not in your contact list) is before a colon after the square brackets. A couple of “separate” functions later you are good to go (there are a couple of other nuances. If you can read R code, check mine here).
chat <- read_lines('~/Downloads/_chat.txt')
tibble(txt=chat) %>%
separate(txt, c("Date", "Content"), '\\] ') %>%
separate(Content, c("Sender", "Content"), ': ') %>%
mutate(
Content=coalesce(Content, Date),
Date=str_trim(str_replace_all(Date, '\\[', '')),
Date2=as.POSIXct(Date, format='%d/%m/%y, %H:%M:%S %p')
) %>%
fill(Date2, .direction = 'updown') %>%
fill(Sender, .direction = 'downup') %>%
filter(!str_detect(Sender, "changed their phone number to a new number") ) %>%
filter(!str_detect(Sender, ' added ') & !str_detect(Sender, ' left')) %>%
filter(!str_detect(Sender, " joined using this group's invite link"))->
mychat
That’s it. You are good to go. You have a nice data frame with sender’s name, message content and date/time of sending. And as one of the teachers at my JEE coaching factory used to say, you can now do “gymnastics”.
And so for the last hour or so I’ve been wasting my time doing such gymnastics. Number of posts sent on each day. Testing the hypothesis that some people talk a lot on the group (I turned out to be far more prolific than I’d imagined). People who start conversations. Whether there are any long bilateral conversations on the group. And so on and so forth (this is how I know there are ~1000 messages on this group).
Now I want to subject all my conversations to such analysis. For bilaterals it won’t be that much fun – but in case there is some romantic or business interest involved you might find it useful to know who initiates more and who closes more conversations.
You can subject the conversations to natural language processing (with what objective, I don’t know). The possibilities are endless.
And the time wastage can be endless as well. So I’ll stop here.
problem. By appointing an external conductor whose only job is to conduct and not play, this 
problem.