Please Don't Say Just Hello in Chat | Hacker News Reader

Please Don't Say Just Hello in Chat

nohello.com

50 pointstontonius43 comments

Within the dupe window (re which see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html):

No Hello (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978860 - Jan 2022 (67 comments)

Also:

No Hello (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24239880 - Aug 2020 (210 comments)

Please Don't Say Just Hello In Chat (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19648415 - April 2019 (265 comments)

Please Don't Say Just Hello in Chat - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14868294 - July 2017 (46 comments)

There are also a bunch of other threads on the same theme, based on different articles, if anybody wants to dig them up...

My least favorite interaction pattern is this:

Person: "hi"

Me: "Hi, what's going on?"

Person: <DMs me about something>

No thank you. Please do not do that. I almost never have an interest with chatting 1:1 with a stranger after they ping a channel ostensibly devoted to a topic. If it's someplace where they're (justifiably) expecting help and support, then I'll provide the help and support there - where other people can also help and check my answers, and where others can find answers to the question there.

Some of us already deal with issues initiating and carrying social interactions, additional protocols around just saying hello seem unnecessary. This in itself is not rude as such but I have seen people responding to hello in a chat with this URL <- That I think is rude and counterproductive. Remote work is difficult as it is, don't be like this to people who have to spend significant amount of their lives with your pompous ass.

Claims to be unskilled at social interaction. Calls everyone else pompous ass when given insight and guidance on social interaction.

Here's some more insight and guidance, this isn't even a social interaction issue, it's a simple communication issue.

I have a couple colleagues who used to do this: send a "hi" first, and then when I responded, only then would start typing out whatever they had to say.

It was infuriating: now I was distracted away from whatever I was doing, on hold waiting for them to do what they could have done in the first place.

Luckily, they responded well when I asked them to just ask their questions directly in the future.

Sadly, by pointing out a wrong use of the chat, you risk being the rude person because you don’t value social interactions. I’ve been tempted to tell the same to my colleagues but refrained because of it.

I mean, that brings back to classic communication/cultural problems. Does one risk being rude one time to fix a situation which is perceived as rude every time?

I've always been overly-accomodating in-person, but I've found it useful to try pushing back (as politely as I can!) every so often. It helps more often than not!

As I got to work in bigger and bigger companies, I started realizing that people are more likely to respond to you when you are clear on the scope of your ask, and what you are looking for.

You get a lot more done if it's an up front wall-of-text, and you put some limits to what you are asking. Doubly so if you give them an out by saying, you'll take a reference for a more appropriate person for the ask (i.e. help me navigate the org with your tribal knowledge).

This is a repost from 2013, FYI. It got quite a bit of traction in Aug 2020, unsurprisingly. https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nohello.com

Just like tabs vs spaces animosity has largely been ended through the use of auto formatters, I think there is a technological solution as well for this.

Create an auto responder for “Hi” and “Hello” that will just echo it back and not cause a notification.

So it becomes:

Other person: Hi

Auto responder: Hi

(No chat notification)

Other person: <Asks question>

(You get chat notifications, if enabled)

You: Answer question

This seems to solve most of the issues, and should be rather simple to implement.

In the same vein, an auto-initiater would work like

Me: <Types question and hit send>

(Doesn't actually get sent yet)

My auto-initiater: Hi

Other person: Hi, <...>

(no chat notification, the original question gets sent now)

Other person: <Answers/Whatever>

(gets chat notification)

I have a comment I would like to make about this article.

I have a reply I would like to make about this comment.

Let me know when you're back at your desk so we can chat about it.

This also irritates me. A lot of people treat chat as a live conversation. To be fair, it is somewhere between a phone call and an email, as it can work both ways.

I usually ignore chat messages that just say hello, until they bother to say what they actually want. Unless I feel like actually chatting with them of course!

This is just whiny. So what someone said hi in your precious chat, either just say hi back or don't. Maybe they just want to make sure they're not talking into a dead channel. And if you're messaging someone directly maybe it's just something you want a synchronous conversation over.

I 100% agree with you. Damage is done anyway, person is interrupted. It’s now a standard to mute Slack/Teams when you are concentrated and let other person call you if it’s urgent. If you let every message interrupt your work maybe you should blame yourself

This. The initial waiting for answer serves for initiating a synchronous conversation. If you wanted an async convo, send an email.

While I get what you're saying (and can even agree to some point), I would suggest consider that there are many different types of chats and business uses for chat.

Basically, a lot of people have to pay attention to chats, but until they get a full description of the problem, they don't know how much attention they need to pay. The cost of _not_ paying attention on a critical issue is far greater than that of paying attention/waiting on a non-critical issue.

To offer a point that does affect me multiple times daily, I work with a lot of technicians that basically help with systems monitoring. For any given message, it might be as simple as as "how can I find more about this process using memory?" or it can be quite critical like "the client infrastructure is completely unresponsive and we cannot get the system live again, help!"

Receiving dozens of such messages daily, it is stressful to get the "Hi" or "Can I ask a question" sort of message knowing that depending on the client/severity, this might need all of my attention now or it might be something I put off until the next week, but I won't know for at least 2-10 minutes (and sometimes even longer!)

Process ought control this, but with all chat platforms I know of, you can't really control for how people chat, they just "do". It's not punishment worthy, it's just annoying, like someone who smacks their lips when they eat.

Of course, this is my specific situation, and not everyone has the same problems, but I would expect that the author of the article and many others agreeing have the same issue I have, and that's why you see such reaction articles about chat etiquette.

Sometime ago I read somewhere that the devs at AOL who worked on AIM had a name for this; it was something like "the AYO problem" for Are You Online?.

Ergo, this issue began sometime not long after the start of The September That Never Ended, apparently.

Hello is fine for the same reason as ACK.

   HELO mailclient.example.com

No, SYN would be the appropriate opener if ACK was an acceptable response.

I like it when people say hello to me :-)

worse offender is asking

  hi, can someone help me?

in a public channel. I am seeing such requests and ask myself "Do I reply? Will I be able to help? How long this will take/Do I have time?". So please don't do that either

hi, did you get my email I just sent you?

But these are incredibly important. For every person who's a "I'd have gotten back to you if I had", theres a "If I haven't gotten back, please reach out, it's off my radar." person.

Same goes for email/post subjects:

"Need help"

"Had a question"

"Weird thing I noticed"

What about when the question is very long or needs a lot of context? Dumping out a huge out-of-the-blue message seems like it might discourage a quick response.

Still write it out before hand in some note app, then do your brief introduction and warn there's a wall of text coming.

This works just fine for PM/DM communication, as you prepare your scenario ahead of time, but still have a shorter, easier to digest introduction the gives the person a chance to either prepare for it or say "sorry, right now is not a good time for a wall of text, go to [person,place,thing]"

I appreciate a good WOT as much as anyone, but I would also advise take the time to think "can I explain this more concisely without losing information in the process?" Communication is hard, chat especially so, and it's something that takes practice. Social media is pretty bad for this as different platforms value different aspects of conversation and benefit different types of discussion. (I must admit it amazes me people have technical conversations on Twitter, as I cannot see the platform is suited for it by any means, but it's a personal preference of course)

Basically though, it's the same strategy; just prepare in advance, and if it's _really_ long, shoot a short message before you write to prepare your partner.

That's a great approach, thanks! I like that it still has the benefit of giving them all the information asynchronously whenever they have a chance to read it, but also gives them an easy intro handle to understand the request and digest it appropriately. Will have to try this out next time.

There's a manager (not mine) that will forward me random emails from customers, with nothing but "Any thoughts?"

It really bothers me.

I have resorted to deliberately ignoring these "hello" messages when they come in, then replying at 6pm on a Friday with "hey what's up?"

PIP Item 1: AggroVanGogh's coworkers report that they are often unhelpful and unresponsive.

> PIP Item 1

It's spooky how you knew I'm a failing AWS employee!

The tools and terms they use to grind us down into story points are the same everywhere...

We need to talk.

nohello.net is the better one

Hi.

hey

sup

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