Every group chat has rules that nobody wrote down and everybody knows. The rule against leaving someone on read for too long. The rule against sending voice notes when a text would do. The rule against bringing up something serious when the chat has been memes for two weeks. None of these rules are enforced. All of them are violated constantly.
Let's go through them.
“Rule one: you do not respond to a conversation that ended four hours ago with a fresh take. The conversation has closed. Everyone moved on. If you arrive late to the chat and have ...”
Rule one: you do not respond to a conversation that ended four hours ago with a fresh take. The conversation has closed. Everyone moved on. If you arrive late to the chat and have a great point about something that was discussed while you were at work, you let it go. You do not resurrect it. Nobody wants to restart an argument they already finished.
Rule two: read receipts are a social contract. If you have them on, you have to respond in a reasonable window or explain yourself. If you have them off, you can ignore whatever you want and claim you never saw it. Everybody knows this. The person with read receipts off has the most power in any group chat and they know it.
Rule three: the voice note threshold. Voice notes are acceptable for two situations: when you are driving, and when the message is long enough that typing it would take five minutes. Voice notes are not acceptable when the message is three sentences, when the recipient is in a meeting they told you about, or when the voice note is more than 90 seconds without being something that required 90 seconds. People send 4-minute voice notes about minor things. This is a violation.
Rule four: the good morning and good night message. Some group chats have this. The person who opens the chat every morning with "good morning" and closes it every night with an equivalent. This is either endearing or exhausting depending entirely on the group. There is no middle position. You either love it or you are calculating when it would be socially acceptable to finally say something.
Rule five: screenshots stay in the chat. What gets said in the group chat stays in the group chat. This is the most important rule and it gets broken the most. Someone always screenshotted something. Someone always sent it somewhere. You assume someone has screenshots of everything you've ever said. You are probably right.
Rule six: the react acknowledgment. When someone posts news, a photo, or anything personal, the minimum viable response is a reaction. Not a text. Not a question. A reaction. Heart, thumbs up, whatever. This takes two seconds. Failing to react to something personal reads as ignoring it. The react is the bare minimum social maintenance and people still can't manage it consistently.
Every group chat is just people trying to maintain a relationship while also being busy and distracted and kind of bad at communication. The rules exist because without them it would be total chaos. The rules are broken because everyone is human. This is fine. This is how it works.