Hacker News Reader

I agree 100% with the sentiment of nohello.com. I used to have it has my status message. I've also gone long periods where I just won't respond when someone hello or hi's me. I've since realized that I was just being difficult and now I just type hey back and it makes life a lot easier.

View on HN

The strategy I've adopted is to first be polite by writing "hey" back [0] and then helping them with whatever they were asking. But THEN I end the conversation with a link to nohello.com to politely ask them to just directly ask next time. That's not being difficult but has the potential to improve things over time.

[0] If I'm in a bad mood I reflect the exact sentence back, meeting "hi" with "hi" and "Hey how are you?" with "Hey how are you?", but still, it's a reply..

They are just lazy to type their question, in case you don't happen to be there right now. So if you don't respond quickly, then they save the work of having to formulate the question.

Typical scenario though is that then they move on ask somewhere else. So they have to type it out anyway. If you don't reply, they can copy-and-paste the question to somebody else.

Or they put up with having to put in a little effort to figure it out themselves or look up the info in the internal documentation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com