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Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

Is this written sarcastically?

Those are all unironically true.

But what does it mean when the third boyfriend of my first boyfriend whose first boyfriend I was keeps watching my Instagram stories but not following me, considering my first boyfriend blocked me everywhere? Are they sitting there together laughing at my stories? Does he watch me out of low self confidence? He must know I know he is watching them. Should I write him? That kind of would violate my rule to accept my first ex desire not to communicate with me ever again.

Young people / social media communication and whole new categories of communication channels / signs/cues like getting your story watched is quite complex!

(ノ゜Д゜)ノ ⌒┻━┻

I will never use any kind of messaging platform that insists on "Read receipts", or even worse, the typing breadcrumbs. Fuck that shit, I'll reply when I'm good and ready, that's a big part of what makes it fun. You never know when you're going to get a sweet little squirt of dopamine == unexpected or surprise reply

Everyone just reads them in the notifications so they don’t mark as read

Can confirm. I have iMessage read receipts turned on. New text comes in, read it in the notification and don't open it until I'm ready to respond.

Except for privacy reasons, I don't show the message body in notifications.

The hack around this is to send an image which can’t be previewed

I consider everyone with read receipts off on WhatsApp someone with mental issues: They crave control and deprive me of context/cues/metadata that already became mainstream. It‘s just like someone only talking to you while wearing a mask that hides their face.

I read messages when they come in because they might be urgent and it does not take very much effort to read a message. Most messages are not urgent, however, and the response (or worse, ensuing real-time conversation) often does require some effort. So if I happen to be engaged in something I'll frequently choose to postpone responding until a more convenient time.

In the past people have taken advantage of this "mainstream" metadata to interrupt me further with increasingly desperate follow-ups and/or to jump to cynical assumptions about their value to me as a person unnecessarily jeopardizing our relationship.

So like GP I turn this functionality off and refuse to use platforms that don't allow it to be disabled. This "feature" is not required for good faith conversations between non-adversarial parties.

Do I crave control over your context? Only insomuch as I refuse to be at the 24/7 beck and call of anyone with a phone. If you want to have a real-time discussion with me you can either have the good fortune to have contacted me at a moment in which I was not otherwise occupied or you can schedule a time with me in advance.

They're in for a rude awakening when they enter the work world.

No. It’s written to be funny but I can vouch that these rules, such as they are, are all more or less correct.

I asked my daughter and her friend who was with her (both 20) if there's a difference between "I'll be home" and "I'll be home." They confirmed, and said the latter is much more serious. And this is in The Netherlands.

I proposed that they were (sort of) pronouncing the punctuation, as in "I'll be home. Period.", and it seems to sound that way. Odd, but it seems wide-spread.

if my girlfriend texted me >I'll be home. I'd assume she was breaking up with me

> pronouncing the punctuation

I do not think you can think of it that way. It's said that the subtleties of spoken language are lost in text, but in this case, the subtleties of the written word are lost in spoken language.

i'm millenial/gen-x cusp, and they all seemed pretty reasonable and intuitive to me, EXCEPT number 3 -- a good-old fashioned simple smiley is passive-aggressive and cold to gen-z??

Serious take: The new generation rejects what was acceptable to the previous generation as part of the process of developing their own identity.

Humorous take: Sensitive snowflakes gonna sensitive.

Here's an attempt to demonstrate how :) can come off as very toxic or passive aggressive:

---

Serious take: The new generation rejects what was acceptable to the previous generation as part of the process of developing their own identity :)

Humorous take: Sensitive snowflakes gonna sensitive :)

And I say that's their problem. ┐(￣ー￣)┌

I got into the habit of using =P to suggest humor or not being too serious, but since I picked it up from someone at least 10 years older than me, I suppose it could come off as toxic or arrogant to people 10 years younger and none have told me yet

That was the most real one imo. The :) is super toxic. Least aggressive would be ^^ or :3

No zoomer I talk to has any idea what ^^ means, it seems like a millennial giveaway. I haven't tested :3, but in general it seems to me they're barely aware of plain-text emotes.

I have seen :) and felt it as toxic. I also don't believe it is inherently toxic.

The surprising part to me is that I have an old pamphlet from Hayes that has a catalog of emoticons as we used to refer to them. This means that :) has changed its meaning in a generation or so... which I never considered that "pictograms" could do that.

It could also be that the context sets the tone and the emoticons are nuanced.

There’s also some etiquette about what emojis are boomer (thus u should never use them).

Same age cohort as you, I’ll continue genuinely using “:)” no matter what.

It's sort of contextual, I think most of the article starts from things that are true in some way, but exaggerates them and takes it a bit too far.

The plain smiley can sound like sarcasm/irony or a passive-agressive tone, because it looks a little lifeless compared to modern emojis that are more expressive. It used to be the most expressive you could be, but now it's the most plain you can be. The least amount of smiling you could be smiling. It can look like a fake smile as a result.

Exactly, it's old fashioned - if you've only ever used a phone keyboard with a dedicated emoji keyboard button, it's conspicuous. This doesn't apply to the emoji version but that has the bad luck of unfortunate, cold representations in most emoji fonts.

This explains it a bit: https://alicecorner.medium.com/the-slightly-smiling-emoji-is... (especially the Spongebob part)

I often wonder if please is passive aggressive and I’m gen-x

It depends on the context, but the standard smiley face has effectively been replaced with the following two:

https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face/

https://emojipedia.org/smiling-face-with-smiling-eyes/

They're correct but it's written in kind of a cringe Buzzfeed way

I have a much younger cousin who happens to be Gen Z and he said that it's mostly exaggerated but saw some elements of it when talking to girls. He's a freshman in university at the moment.

For sarcasm sentences can be suffixed with /s

I refuse to do this on Reddit. I long for a simpler time when it was literally impossible to tell who was being sarcastic and who is a genuine crazy person.

I don't think so. I found myself lol'ing (as in actually laughing out loud) at the accuracy.

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