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Comment by don-code | Hacker News Reader

While I do appreciate the humor here, it's a personal gripe that conversations on Slack tend to optimize towards speed of responses - and when taken to an extreme, they take the form of:

> This message

> is

> sent over a few lines

(awkward pause)

> so that

> I can get in a point

> before you start typing something

Asynchronous means of communication (Github PRs, Jira tickets, dare I say e-mails) mean that I submit a fully-formed thought as a digest, but Slack sometimes becomes a stream of consciousness - one that I have trouble breaking someone out of.

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Usually it doesn't look like that, the first part is self contained and the remaining are small additions that they figured out in the moment. If you tell people to stop doing that then all that will happen is that they wont write those clarifications.

I on the other hand don't enjoy people who write paragraph upon paragraph in a single message. Its chat. Just quickly hammer off your stream of consciousness rambling into the chat; send an email otherwise.

Look at it this way, they're gonna make their point anyway. The sooner you know the better ;)

Sending message after message with no complete point until last one is like holding a mutex to the person’s attention. Annoyance, there is no other way to look at it.

As long as it's asynchronous I'm fine with people doing this. It's coworkers who go "Hello dukeyukey" and pause is what annoys me. Being polite is great, but let me know what you want before I decide to drop what I'm working on to chat about it.

Yeah

"Yt?"

"Yes"

"Coworker is typing..." for 20 minutes

The above is a way more frustrating interaction because it feels that now the coworker feels I'm obligated to respond to a much longer query than I had anticipated. I'd expected a short query which I could either answer offhand or evaluate its priority to indicate if I had time to handle it. Instead I now need to let someone down that after 20 minutes of explaining their problem, I actually don't have the time or info to help them debug their CI build.

It's gotten to the point that I simply stopped answering these naked hellos/yt questions.

even worth is

A: Hello @B!

... waiting ...

B: yeah, what's up?

A: how are you?

B: fine, what's up?

A: i have a question

B: ... okay ...

A: (now the real question comes, whuch then requires lots of clarification ...)

B: yes (or "no" and thst's the full answer needed)

You can passive-aggressively link them to https://nohello.net/ or https://nohello.club/, see if they get the message.

A worse one yet is where they go "hello?", then an X minutes after you sigh and say 'yeah?' they call you.

It is pretty annoying when people pause like that. I don't see why they can't buffer their writes until they get a complete thought (Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst).

It isn't fully asynchronous if notifications are enabled. With notifications, you are more like a single cpu server that has to handle hardware interrupts for disk/network io. It stops you from working and forces context switching, only people aren't as good at context switching.

"Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst"

Pro-tip if you're one of those: If you look at the slack interface, there's not a lot of visual difference between two messages in a row, and a single message separated by two newlines (SHIFT-Enter if you don't know how to enter those).

It looks exactly the same to type "Hey.\n\nJust wanted to check up on the status of the de-fooification project. How's that going?" as it is to send those as two separate messages, it looks just as polite on the screen, and it's way less annoying.

Not relevant for your "Hey" example but I often do submit successive thoughts as separate messages rather than one less disruptive message because it allows readers to add reactions/responses to the individual thoughts.

Ha. I do this. It's emotional energy. Lacking seriousness or im too preoccupied with how my reply will be understood or not.

Granted, I dont think I ever stopped at 'hey-'

Even worse is people who type "hey", and then don't type anything else until you "hey" back.

Even worse is "Hey, I want to talk about something. I'll call you in 30 minutes."

I think it's perfectly acceptable to leave them 'on hold' until they actually write something. If they don't, then it wasn't anything important.

Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst

You don’t have colleagues who type “hey” and then wait for your reply, do you?

Someone should write a bot like the gp that autoreplies “hey, how is your day going so far?” to a single “hey” line.

> Saying "hey", then typing the next message is the worst

"hey" [waits for a response; then a long pause and agonisingly slow typing after you've said hey back]

"Can I ask you a question?" [waits for a response] [agonisingly slow typing coupled with intermittent pauses].

Always makes me want to yell at people to just ask their damn question.

I for one prefer stream of consciousness in chat.

That is the point of chat.

If I want structured longform discourse I use mailing lists.

If I have to read it, I’d rather you take your time thinking about what you are writing. For voice or video, stream of consciousness works well.

And if I am waiting for a reply, I would rather you spit out what you're saying rather than waste my time waiting for you to say it prettier.

No communication heuristic will be perfect.

There's a balance. Like the example the OP gave is abysmal. I do not want that. Have one or two actual sentences and send it, if we're in an actual live conversation. If you can't type that fast enough, take a typing course.

If we're not actively talking, write the whole damn paragraph before you send it! One thing I really dislike is:

    > Hey, how's going?

... some time later ...

    > Can I ask you a question on $TOPIC?

...

Will not get an answer from me. Well maybe once, if we've never talked before and that will be along the lines of "just go ahead and ask, don't bother with the chit chat". Most people 'get' this nowadays but there are some hold-outs. I suppose the hold-outs might be more numerous in non-tech companies or in the non-tech departments of those companies.

You're not alone with this specific gripe. Some of my colleagues include sites similar to https://nohello.net in their staff directory page.

I tend to find the best response to any chat message that boils down to "Hey, can I ask you a question?" is "You just did."

The worst is when I ignore their preamble, waiting on the question and the other person turns around and shoots an email to my manager, cc'ing me and saying 'so and so was away, do you know who I might ask about x?'. Like, no, I was just waiting for you to get to the point!

> if I am waiting

Just don't. It's still asynchronous.

So much this. I would rather people spit it out than agonize word smithing with me.

I don't know why people treat text as different from speaking.

I read much faster than most people can speak though so I consider stream of consciousness in text as way less demanding than doing it in a meeting.

Man, I'm the complete opposite. It's pretty much instantaneous for me to read (or not really read) a few words on a screen, but if you're droning on in the video chat or on the phone, god help us.

I wonder if the OP is referring to channels versus DMs? Also this is maybe a huge culture thing at least regarding "inherited channel etiquette"

In a DM I am _for sure_ stream of consciousness

edit: also in a #red channel

I am the same in channels or DMs, with the only exception being alert channels that need to be on topic and low noise.

Conversations are fine as long as messages contain complete thoughts that merit a response. Saying hey in one message, then typing and then sending the message does no one any good, all it does is interrupt the receiver and force a context switch before you can run any instructions/respond.

I remember on ICQ I used to like to use the mode where you saw each character your partner typed. Google Wave was satisfying in that way too.

Some data modes on ham radio work like this. You can even see them fix typos over the air.

Lots of fun.

I have no ideas how many times I'd have been fired if Slack did this. Let's just say my first pass on a message in the heat of the moment can sometimes be less than professional.

When talking in person over some beers that is exactly what you get.

I talk to people in chat like I would IRL.

Personally I only like working with people that don't feel they need a filter. I sure don't have one.

I find it is easier to trust people that say what they think and feel as they think and feel it.

If you think "this code is an insecure joke and I keep trying to convince myself why we should not scrap it all and start over", then say it.

I said that to a CEO once and he admitted he wrote most of that code, thanked me for my candor, and agreed it should be rewritten given how important it had become.

Live typing would really trip me up. I'd probably wind up drafting my messages in a text editor and pasting them in.

https://nohello.net/

I think one should make a distinction between chat in public channels and direct messages; with the latter, you're causing the other party a notification and drawing the attention, with the former, the reader can engage with it at their own leisure.

While your example is clearly a strawman, I have to admit I tend to many short messages on chats.

It's not email, there is someone sitting on the other side who waits, so I give them something to read. When I call them, they also hear what I say when I say it and not after the whole message is complete.

There's Slo, which is a slow mode admin plugin for Slack. I wish it were baked in like Discord's slow mode (hopefully it exist in Slack and someone will correct me.)

I agree it's really poor etiquette to make the view scroll for no reason and to make it hard for others to participate. It's fine in DMs or maybe with 3-4 likeminded people, but in anything meant for wider reading or participation it's rude (usually unintentionally) and counterproductive. Fortunately, since it's not intentionally rude, it's not a big deal to teach that good middle ground.

Chat is for conversations it should be a back and forth, if you don't like that choose a method of communication that isn't a conversation.

I turn off typing indications and also don't send my status to the server for the same reason. I've never liked them, and actually have always felt that they were a bit invasive. Why should the other party know that I typed up something and then decided not to send it?

Ha, someone on my project does exactly that...it never occurred to me it might be for perceived speed, I just figured ADHD... :^)

Hey Don-Code

(made a coffee, put out the bins whilst I had your imaginary attention)

.. I completely agree with what you wrote. Just please skip the niceties and write the whole request in one message. Prefix with the greeting! And any follow up details can go in a thread.

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