Clatter

A social media/chat app. Seems to be somewhere between a microblogging site and live chat. Most posts are images or videos; very media heavy. Mostly used by young people. One of the default reading modes is a 'scream' which is a high-speed slideshow, flipping through the most recent image posted by all your friends at slightly faster than one pic per second. Both the friends you interact with most and how recently an image was posted determine which ones are shown first.

The site was built around the principle that everything is ephemeral. There are no long-term 'friend' or 'follow' interactions, you will always see posts from people you have interacted with heavily or recently. The only access control is for channels (private chats), which expire after 28 hours of inactivity.

Terminology

Some of this is the platform coming up with weird terms that they might be able to trademark; more is the first wave of users (typically older teens) who thought it was funny to use words that their parents would have no idea what they're talking about. A lot of this is deliberately obtuse.

• Blip - a video post. These may be cut down or sped up to fit into the scream. You need to interact with someone a lot (or at least watch a lot of their blips) before any video will be allowed to take up more than a second.
• Blob - a stock image, most often a caricature portrait of the poster with text saying "tap for more" or similar. Used when you have a text post you want people to read (the blob shows up on people's scream/board, and once you got their attention they might stop to read the line). Most users have 4-5 blobs that they will cycle through when they want to post text.
• Board - an alternative viewing mode which shows friends' recent posts as a collage
• Channel - an actual private chat. In keeping with the 'chaotic' theme, any post can be designated a channel, and anyone can reply to one. However, you can only see the replies to a channel if one of your replies to it has been either replied to or pulsed by someone who is already in
• Cloud - a semi-private group chat that's only accessible to people who have the link, or people mentioned in it (getting bits of a random cloud on your board is quite common, as it uses fuzzy matching of your username or real name rather than any kind of explicit @mention)
• Dot (also "dit" or "skull" - weirdly, the official term "dot" is never used when the person speaking is the recipient of the dot) - a dot in the corner which can be tapped on content you're not interested in. Both discourages the algorithm from showing you anything similar, and if a post gets dotted by a large proportion of the people who see it, it will automatically be shown to community moderators who have the power to delete and ban. Certain bad language may also attract autodots. Also a slang term for sex. "He dotted me" means having sex with someone; "I dotted him" is ambiguous. 'dit' is used if you want to avoid confusion.
• Line - a post which doesn't have an image. As they're not shown in the scream and are relegated to the bottom of board view, they will generally go unseen unless you tag someone (so messages are usually sent as tags on someone's most recent post)
• Pulse - a ♥ icon in the corner of the screen. A user will see a list of the most recent people who pulsed their latest post, so it's often used as a notification that someone has seen a message. Pulsing also increases the odds of your friends seeing the post in their scream
• Scream - a slideshow of friends' recent posts
• Stream - a slideshow of recent posts from a particular user
• Tag - a reply
• View - to deliberately click on a bunch of someone's posts (taking you to a page with a posting date and text description) so that the algorithm will show you more of their stuff

Known Users

• Tess Naylor (and most of her friends)