I’ve noticed something similar to this, where I walk into a room and it goes silent enough that it’s like the stereotype of a cowboy walking into a saloon. There’s only one place where I can trust this to never happen.

I’m not a joking person and I feel similar situations. Maybe I’m the extreme opposite, my (almost) complete lack of lightheartedness leads me to face echo chambers, both IRL and in the cyberspace. I do some memes and I say/post some funny things but my essence is imbued with non-conformist thoughts.

If this was reddit this thread would have no replies.

This would have been hilarious if nobody had replied…

It’s all in your head dude. Don’t worry about it.

Do you experience people becoming silent and staring at you with disgust when you make a joke in real life?

Should we tell him, guys?..

Holy shit, the sociology of group chats is complex as fuck judging from these comments. I hate them too much to ever have stopped and wondered why I hate them.

My suggestion would echo Bukowski: Don’t try. It’s perfectly fine to only respond in the group chat when something needs to be coordinated. Everything else one on one communication is better for. And if you do feel like interacting, don’t force it. Silence is never wrong. On the contrary.

I don’t even do group chats for party invitations. I just text everyone individually. It’s a little more work but it’s so much nicer, as far as I’m concerned.

Then again, I was born in the 90s. I’m a grumpy old man and without a doubt out of thouch.

Maybe your interjecting into a convo and not saying something worth responding to? I would imagine that making a joke in text isn’t that funny because its not spoken its read.

I’m going to be honest and try not to be rude. This is only my observation from my perspective and may be wildly wrong. I looked through your comment history. You seem to be polite and communicative. That’s not a bad thing. However, your comments don’t seem very funny or interesting to me. I communicate through humor. I understand that it is subjective, but I’m not often in chats or conversations that awkwardly die out.

Show some more of your personality in what you say. Compliment others. Leave them with questions. Do you think maybe the answer to your question isn’t what you are saying, it’s how you are saying it?

I don’t do group chats anymore because whatever I say gets unanswered, or replied to and buried in the conversation.

With friends we do video chat. Also seems in large group chats, there are often like 10 different parallel conversations going on and it is hard to keep track of. No one waits or treats it like an actual group discussion.

i used to struggle with this too, op.

the only reason i don’t struggle with it anymore is because i ran out of sufficient energy to struggle.

however, that was not what resolved it–not directly.

no longer agonizing over my conversations had other effects.

i decided that if all i can be is background noise, then i shall be background noise. and that … loosened my hesitation. i physically lost the ability to attach any kind of ulterior motive or emotional baggage to what i wanted to say, and so, my messaging became more open and honest as a result, in a way i never had the choice to implement at will. it took breaking down to no longer proverbially have a wall there.

and then, at another point after this had metaphorically cleaned my slate, i decided to start over by embodying what i felt was missing. i would be the warmth that no one was showing. i would greet, and encourage, and ask nonbinary question–but i don’t think this would have worked if i had not first shattered my own guard and begun engaging my social interactions with totally exposed vulnerability.

They can smell it on you like a dog.

In my experience every chat group has a person that’s the glue. What I mean is sometimes unintentionally that group chat only reacts when the glue person(s) are engaging. So if you work out who that is in your group and have them engage with you, it’ll become lively.

Been there done that.

A few years back I went back to an old Internet haunt that I hadn’t been to in more years still.

People were there, chatting, including at least one person I knew who’d been there previously. I should have taken the hint when he joked that he “didn’t spend a lot of time there, honest” (paraphrase), but I basically picked up where I’d left off years before rather than feel out the new vibe. There were about twenty or so people there at first, and I only really noticed when there were ten or so left and they weren’t saying much.

I left. Haven’t had the nerve to go back. If I do, I’ll try to feel out the vibe first.

In the meantime, I’ve found other places to hang out and different people. But I still try to reel myself in occasionally, just in case.

I used to have this problem and I’m not sure exactly how to fix it but I can say that it helps a lot if you consider what potential responses you might get before you speak. Don’t just say things because you want to say them, say things because they open up the conversation for interesting responses. This is not the same as “asking a lot of questions” because that’s exhausting, as anyone who’s dealt with a Sealion knows. Instead, try to say things that are open-ended. If your chat’s tone is comedic, try not fixing your typos so that someone else can chain a joke off of them. If the chat’s tone is serious, try making an analogy that connects the current topic to a previous one. If the chat’s tone is toxic, you can leave.