The group chat has quietly grown a real, unwritten constitution, and in 2026 two unrelated sources, a wire etiquette guide and a magazine's reader poll, wrote most of it down without comparing notes.
Where they landed:
- Scale your manners to the size: in a chat of three even an emoji reply is expected; in a chat of fifty, nobody owes you a response
- Consolidate, because "no one wants to read a 7-inch-long unformatted message when an organized attachment would have worked better"
- Side chats are fine, 79 percent of readers bless them, and 63 percent find silent lurking creepy
The one rule experts and readers agreed on completely: don't vanish. Say something before you leave, in one line. It costs you nothing and spares fifty people a notification about nothing.
