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At some point (I can't recall exactly when) someone decided to add "typing indicators" to instant messaging software. Despite being a bad and harmful feature, there was not enough pushback against "typing indicators", and in time they wormed their way into nearly every instant messaging network, and were turned from an "on by default" feature that you can configure your way out of, into a mandatory feature that can't be turned off.
Still, messaging networks die or decline in popularity all the time, and new ones pop up to replace them. So perhaps there's still some value in putting this message out there, in the hope that it will eventually come to the attention of the people who are going to design the networks that will come to replace what's currently in fashion.
One of the things I really liked about chatting in the time before typing indicators, is how much control it gave me over my self-presentation. Where in-person speech is full of false starts, stutters, and unseemly "uh"s and "erm"s, a typed message can be as clean as you care to make it. On IRC, I could present a version of myself that is articulate, put-together, perhaps even witty on a good day.
Typing indicators are simply a way to capture some of the messiness of in-person speech and inject it right back into written communication. Typing indicators forcefully peel back my mask of "person who speaks in well-formed sentences", and expose the underlying "person who finally managed to form a coherent sentence on the fifth attempt". And I don't like that.
The other thing I don't like about typing indicators is what seeing one does to my brain. When a typing indicator pops up on my screen, I instinctively react as if my interlocutor and I were chatting face to face. That is, I wait for them to finish typing their message, careful not to interrupt or offend them by appearing inattentive. Which is stupid, because I can't actually "talk over them" -- even if I were to type and sent a message of my own while they're still in the process of composing theirs, that "interruption" wouldn't cause the messaging software on their side of the wire to unilaterally wipe out their own WIP message. And as for inattention, while it's good manners to pay attention to the words said (or typed) by my interlocutor, it does not follow that I owe any attention to a blank messaging app window with no words in it, merely because it is likely to eventually display a bunch of words in some indeterminate time in the near future.
You could call that a "skill issue", and say that if I predictably react to the typing indicator in a stupid way, I should "just" train myself to react in a non-stupid way. But in this case, the non-stupid way to react to typing indicator would be to completely ignore it. And if you're supposed to ignore an indicator, then that indicator is just useless visual clutter and has no right to exist in the first place.