Lesson: Stop saying “Hi” and waiting for a response

Otherwise known as a "naked ping" and discussed in many places before:

- https://blogs.gnome.org/markmc/2014/02/20/naked-pings/ - https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/No_naked_pings - https://blog.doismellburning.co.uk/nobody-likes-naked-pings/ - https://www.die-welt.net/2020/06/naked-pings-2020/

At a previous employer I stopped responding to “Hi”.

It was interpreted by the “hi” folks as me not ever being at work.

Eventually (as I anticipated) someone complained that I missed an important priority issue about X.

I had to explain how “hi” /= important issue about X and that I revive so many “hi” messages that I couldn’t assume they’re all important.

It was pretty tiresome explaining it, but it worked, I stopped getting “hi” and got “hi, important issue X”.

I've wondered if the subconscious reason for sending "hi" / disliking receiving "hi" is that -- in the same way as a read receipt -- it denies the recipient the chance to read the message and tactfully choose to ignore it for some time.

E.g. no-one likes being saddled with urgent work; therefore pretending you haven't yet seen a request for such until you feel like dealing with it may be a common response; therefore asking "hi" is an attempt to establish real-time communication and thus force an immediate response to a potentially unpalatable request.

It's funny because unless someone follows up I will very likely never respond to a message that just says, "Hi"

I tend to just ask questions immediately. I've heard some people like a little more pretext so I say, "Hey Hey. Insert question or reason I messaged" now.

I wonder where we pick up these defaults.

In places where I commonly have people asking me tech questions, I fairly often have to repeat Rule 1 of Asking Danaris Questions:

Ask The Damn Question.

I usually only have to say it once to a given person, and repeating it in public chats when people ping me there without an actual question tends to reduce the incidence of "naked pings" generally for a while.

For a while, I tried having https://nohello.com/ in my Discord status, but that's not the most visible indicator, so I haven't been doing it lately.

Also stop tagging me in a direct message, it doesn't send an extra notification...

It just muddies up search when I [later] want to see where I've been mentioned in channels

Thanks Vishnu for repackaging reddit threads for us

https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/t48pfa/lpt_don...

My tactic to reply simply “hi” back.

As I've heard it from IRC, "Don't ask to ask, just ask." - https://dontasktoask.com/

our internal policy is to say hi because a lot of us might be screen sharing to clients and most people are bad about setting the flag to not show message text in the notification area.

I've had a rule about this since SMS caught on. Any time someone send a "call me" type message, my only response is "about what?" I try to enforce the same concept with meetings and slack and any other place where it makes sense. Naked pings feel like a trap and while they rarely are, it has happened before and by forcing context before agreeing to a discussion, I've avoided being caught off guard.

this guy is trying to go straight from http/1.1 to http/3 in real life.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine.

this is a cultural thing as well- I moved to Mexico and it's huge here, and I have to tell people not to do it

nohello.com