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Comment by gnulinux | Hacker News Reader

I have never met a single person in my life who didn't ghost multiple people especially in business and dating. Like I receive 10 messages from LinkedIn everyday from recruiters trying to hire me when I'm not on the job market and trying to focus on my job and hobbies. What am I supposed to do?

It's clearly rude to ghost friends, acquaintances, business partners etc. But if someone reached out to you with the intention of doing business with you, I think it's ok to ghost them if you're 100% not interested. Am I wrong?

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Ignoring some recruiter you've never heard of isn't 'ghosting'. 'Ghosting' is when someone you know, and have a reasonable expectation will take your calls, suddenly stops taking them, without explanation.

It's a discourteous and lazy way of dumping a romantic interest.

>It's a discourteous and lazy way of dumping a romantic interest.

Language isn't fixed, the meaning of words, especially "new" words (and ghosting is a new verb) changes over time. That was the original meaning, but it's now applied to all relationships.

>Ghosting is by no means limited to long-term romantic relationships. Informal dating relationships, friendships, even work relationships may end with a form of ghosting.

https://www.psycom.net/what-is-ghosting

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ghosting

I was unclear (in the interest of brevity:-)

For clarity, I didn't mean that ghosting was only to do with dumping partners. I suppose I was suggesting that that's the canonical example.

Ah alright. I thought you didn't know. Have a good one.

I think it's only ghosting if you break off a conversation, not if you never start one. If I send you Viagra spam and you don't reply that's clearly not ghosting.

I think "ghosting" is also used when one person breaks off a conversation, but the other person continues the conversation despite the conversation being broken off. At that point, an obnoxiously persistent person may conclude that that are being ghosted, rather than noticing that the conversation was over.

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