Hacker News Reader

Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

So is text chat. Shame most people have such low attention span they actually get angry when you don’t answer within seconds, let alone longer. I have been trying to get people to accept email and chat as async for decades and for some it is natural, others throw absolute fits.

View on HN

I dunno.

I think it's a continuum, for one thing.

Phone calls are clearly sync. But IM on the desktop is, in my working life, much closer to sync than email.

I think of phone texts as attempts at unobtrusive but still mostly synchronous communication.

Yeah. A lot of it is convention of course. But where I work, Google Chat for individuals and small groups has sort of developed in general into a higher priority interrupt than email. e.g. are you joining this scheduled call?

On the other hand, the group chat for a broader team I'm in is more likely to be used for idle non-work-related chit chat.

And phone calls basically aren't used at all outside of scheduled meetings.

Its called "Instant Messaging" :-) So I think the expectation is built into the name, even if you don't agree.

I would have to disagree. To me "Instant Messaging" != "Instant Answering". It's only a guarantee that the message is delivered instantly.

And unfortunately there is an implicit expectation that the reply is to be sent immediately as well.

Start with disabling auto away :)

It's a question of the topic. Some topics need to be handled synchronously. And if you don't answer in a conversation this is legitimately perceived as "rude".

If the topic of this conversation is whether or not IM should be considered synchronous, then this argument doesn't hold up. If I take one side and suppose that IM should not be synchronous, then obviously the mistake in your case is on the individual that tried to use it for a topic that needed to be synchronous. The not-responding person is not wrong in that case since they're ostensibly using the method of communication as intended.

Part of it is that, in many cases, we've normed not calling people on the phone out of the blue. And, while some may disagree, we often do need some reasonably real-time communication channel. Someone may not see a message instantly but it is reasonable to have some mechanism in a business setting to generally reach people quickly--if for example, there're supposed to be someplace.

Looking at people my age it is only gonna get worse, considering how even relationships work now. Hundred years ago you would be happy to recieve a written letter every month or so, nowadays not responding to your partner within seconds could be treated as a valid reason for breaking up...

A bullet dodged, I guess. But yes, norms are changing, not for the better.

Yeah, the vast majority of people would see it as erratic to break up with someone for not responding to a text within a few seconds. It's not culture or technology that's the issue, but the personality of the anxious person who ask to break up over just that.

I think it's both the individual personality as well as growing up in an online world. I'm not an expert but I'm thinking it has the power to actively rewire a person's brain. If in your entire lifespan so far you do not know any better than for everything to be available always and instantly, that creates an entirely different creature.

But you would primarily live with the person or within walking distance. Hundreds of years ago if you ignored your partner for the whole day while living with them that would probably be grounds to break up as well.

I don't have experience with anyone actually throwing a fit for not insta-replying. But one factor is that for some people not-insta-replying == never replying.

Email and text as async communication only works if both parties actually have the processes in place to reply async.

Ah yes, the inevitable "???" after 30 seconds. Fuck my life.

Because it is supposed to be faster than email. In my opinion it should almost be equivalent of asking someone in real life if they got time to talk.

Supposed to be. Email these days is also instant and I have indeed people calling right after sending emailing to ask if I got it. I never did or will use outlook , but I know many people in business settings who use the slowness of it (‘stuck in outbox’ etc) to force it to be more async. With gmail or others you don’t have any excuses; it’s as fast as chat.

If people who send a chat message are all asking me ‘if I have time to talk’, life is over if I say yes; it is always no aka async. And for most people I work with and definitely friends, that works well, just strangers usually have to be educated a bit and some never learn (and are just ignored generally).

when the first instant messengers came out (ICQ and i don't remember what else) i was arguing that they could have used SMTP as a protocol, and people got on my case that email and chat would be fundamentally different and should not be mixed.

today i am happly using deltachat, which effectively proves my point.

the primary difference between email and chat is threading. and even that can be handled.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com