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Comment by proto-n | Hacker News Reader

I'm far from gen z, but I spent a lot of time communicating through chat in the past ~20 years, and I've gotta say, to me, most of this is not "Gen Z" stuff, but "chat native" stuff. It becomes pretty obvious pretty soon when somebody doesn't really know the (for lack of a better word) language of these small nuances and a bunch of others, like message length, timings, etc.

It's not done to be edgy, or to fit in, or anything like that. Its different tones in text. If the other party doesn't speak this language, then the communication becomes very literal, very formal. Kind of like how someone who is oblivious to social cues comes across in spoken conversations, only without the stigma, as its quite normal to not know this stuff. But it's much harder to 'feel' the other person.

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I interact with a fair number of people who are either older Gen Z, or younger Millennials. They don't follow half of the rules in the blog post (example: you become un-dateable if you don't use lots of emojis on dating apps... seriously?). Of the rest, many have been around for decades (example: imperfect capitalization and punctuation does, in fact, imply informality, always has).

If you read someone's text and then also read their Instagram story and you still haven't replied, that's fine. If anything it's a bit of a power move. But really it's just what ends up happening when you're busy and don't have time to dick around on social media and overthink shit.

The article smacks of a mild anxiety disorder which is a common affliction of youth (sadly increasingly these days it's not so mild). The author would do well to ignore other people's petty shit and spend the next decade preoccupied with kicking ass at whatever he's best at.

Yeah, much of these (or variations) applied to online live chat or async forums in the '90s. Though different venues had different conventions.

And rules like in the article would all be easy to remember. What's not in the article is whether/what skills you'll need to develop to process all this information and noise.

For example, I remember seeing a busy chat room for the first time in the mid-'90s, and there was so much people talking, and it was scrolling seemingly too fast to read. (Bonus: I was on a then-vintage green CRT terminal, HP 2392A, at that moment, so incomprehensible scrolling of symbols was not entirely unlike the Matrix visual.)

But after some experience with the chat, it was no longer overwhelming. I could glance at the scrollage and have a sense of who was talking, what was being discussed, and possibly some meta of what was going on. And, for incoming messages, I could be tracking and selectively focusing among the often multiple concurrent threads of conversation.

I suppose skills a bit analogous to that might include how to manage the many different online services today you have to be on today, applying critical processing to advertising/engagement feed algorithms, juggling all this inefficient stuff with more real-life things, etc.

A lot of it isn’t just chat native stuff imo.

All the rules around instagram likes and reposting, the rules around “k”, that “:)” is passive aggressive etc. A lot of that feels juvenile which makes sense if it’s a gen z post. I’d guess it’ll stop once out of teens and early to mid twenties.

I think when people are more secure/confident they stop doing as much meta analysis of this kind.

Yes, feeling offended about being called young is part of the package too. We know, we used to be.

Pretty strongly disagree with this. I consider myself "chat native". Talking to people on the internet via text has been my primary method of interpersonal communication to people outside my family for 20 years now, from around when I was in middle school. I'm as "chat native" as you come and a lot of this has nothing to do with "chat native" anything.

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