one of my favourite things about your chillstreams is how well you and your friends can manage to take turns contributing to conversations and avoiding crosstalk. two questions about this:
how do you (plural) decide whoever becomes the "moderator"? is it whoever's stream you're on?
is this something you also do off-stream or is it for the sake of a broadcast?
The short, honest answer to this is actually "I am not friends with people who crosstalk in the first place." I have bad auditory sensory overload issues and it makes me beyond furious when people talk over one another.
A more helpful answer might be this diagram.
I don't remember where I heard about this concept or what it's called so I'm going to call it a Laugh Pyramid. I someone taught it to me in college improv classes.
Imagine a comedian telling a joke and the audience laughing at it.
The red line is the intensity of the audience's reaction over time. If you watch any comedy special, you'll notice the comedian doesn't wait for the audience to stop laughing entirely. That results in a loss of energy. You want to keep moment from one successful joke and carry it into the next one.
Obviously the comedian doesn't want to cut off the laugh at it's peak, so you wait until just after it starts to die down.
General conversation kind of works the same way.
Imagine the red spikes are someone talking about something over time in a normal conversation. The peaks in this line can be any kind of intensity. Could be volume, how focused the speaker is, how on topic they are, etc.
At risk of sounding like a robot or alien who studies humans, this is some good practice I've found for conversation:
If you have something you want to contribute to the conversation (i.e. something in your friend's story reminds you of a related story that would be a great follow-up) you should start actively listening for an entry point.
Obviously, you don't want to cut them off. A comedian on a stage is in control of the conversation, but you aren't. You need to wait until it sounds like the speaker is reaching the conclusion of their thought.
The ? is a possible entry point because it seems like they're winding down... but then the speaker picks the thought back up again. Whoops. Turns out they had more to say. Don't cut them off right now.
The ! is a better point to start talking because they're actually winding down. Learning to spot this conversational rhythm takes awhile. Everyone has different speaking patterns from each other. Everyone speaks differently in different groups. And this is even harder when there's multiple people involved in a conversation.
Also, be sure to set up flags to indicate that you're about to start talking. Little meaningless sounds or linguistic back channeling.
If I want to follow up on what a person is saying I usually start with a quick "Oh", "Yeah", "mm", or just some kind of tiny sound. That sound is an audible cue to everyone that you want to talk next, like raising your hand in a Zoom call.
This makes transitioning from speaker A to speaker B easier, but it also helps speakers C, D, E, and so on notice that someone else wants to talk.
If speaker B and C both want to follow-up on what A is saying, obviously only one of them can talk at a time. But, if they both use a little auditory flag, the other speakers might notice. So if A speaks and B follows up with a second thought, B can end that thought with "Anways, C, you were gonna say something?" and you can pass it over to the next person.
It's important to keep track of who's trying to get a word in so you can all help the conversation flow. Sometimes people get skipped over multiple times and you need someone who's a little more forward to help them find an in.
I've found most people also have little unconscious things they do to signal that they have finished talking.
For example, if you watch any of my streams, you might notice that almost every time I do a joke or a bit, when I hit the punchline you can hear a laugh leak into my voice. I do this so often when I'm telling a joke that if I manage to keep a straight face the entire time, my friends often pause longer before reacting because they're so used to the laugh sound as a subconscious cue that they aren't sure I'm done speaking without it. Piph also does this with a very specific little "nn! hehe" sound he makes after doing a joke.
Obviously this isn't the kind of thing 99% of people will consciously notice. I've spent a four-digit number of hours editing recordings of my voice as well as my friends so I'm hyper aware of their ticks. But most people have one. You probably have some you only do with some friend groups and not others.
I two of us ever speak over each other for more than like 5 words, one (or usually both) of us stop talking and straight up say some version of "no you go".
All of this is a practiced skill.
I genuinely do not understand how in the digital voice-call Discord-is-every-forum-now age we live in people still think they can just railroad someone else while talking. It is insane to me and is like the #1 way to make me not like you.
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