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Comment by kelseyfrog | Hacker News Reader

On shared rituals, the ones I like the most are

1. Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day. It signals that you're continuing to participate and value the group.

2. @Welcomes. When a new member joins, they are @-ed with a welcome message by the users currently present. It helps expand the join->engage funnel. Some groups have a lot of people show up and then never participate.

3. Wednesday, My Dudes. Where the group plays participates in the same weekly ritual of wishing each other a happy Wednesday. See also: Today Is Friday In California.

In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in. Obviously one has to read the room first and get a sense it's the right ritual for the group.

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This might just be me, but I actually hate these things. They always feel forced and corny and seeing the notification in a channel and thinking it is something interesting only to have it be another copy paste good morning message is distracting and annoying.

I fully acknowledge I may be the odd one out here, as I find any repeated action like this quickly becomes either noise that gets ignored or creates a sense of obligation that breeds resentment.

Even discord’s welcome emotes feel super fake and shallow. I’d rather people actually send human messages or not say anything.

Old man rant over.

You're not alone. I think it depends on what group chat represents for you.

For me, group chats are a way to coordinate with people and share with people. Token or ritual messages do neither of those things and feel like misuse to me. I'd find the GP's group chats to be noisy and obnoxious and I'd be gone in a minute.

Connecting with people is something I do in other ways and by other mediums (and usually involve more mindful effort than token/ritual messages anyway).

Entirely agree with you.

People will walk into the office, say good morning to everyone, then log into their computer and post "good morning" on Slack.

Same routine at end of day. Type "good night", then walk around and actually say good night to people.

90% of our Slack history is just "good morning" and "good night", repeated for 4 years.

(We're all back in office, and don't use Slack for anything cool)

> 90% of our Slack history is just "good morning" and "good night", repeated for 4 years.

Better write a bot for that! Save your company some serious overhead right there =)

Everyone is slightly different.

I am the type that likes saying good morning and telling people to have a good weekend on chat.

This is largely for myself. It makes me feel like I am part of the team. It is how I would interact on any team I am part of.

Most other people on the team don't respond and that is perfectly fine. I would say I am more the odd one out than you though. You sound more like the average person who thinks it is kind of stupid so doesn't respond.

I know I am not the first person to say this, but those are the types of things that make me leave a group chat.

Then again I don't even "good morning" my partner unless maybe if it's a big day for either one of us, so I may just be way way outside the intended target audience for this type of group chat.

I hate 1 & 3. DING morning. (Great, what do I do wi-)DING [...]

At least it's over by about 9.30. Worse is the 'brb's, 'just getting lunch', 'school run' etc. - we're not talking, perhaps haven't talked for weeks, I don't need to talk to you, I don't need anything from you, I don't care where you're going, for all I knew you already weren't there. Just set your actual status if you think someone might give a shit. (You know, next to the one that shows you're online, so I don't need your Morning.)

> In my experience, it's easy to introduce these into a group simply by modeling them. After a week or two of consistent behavior, someone else, and then many others will join in.

Well, that's the nail in my the coffin of my plan to stop people doing it by not participating!

Oh the final semi-related thing I have to rant about that I obviously don't want to at work/to the people that do it - little emojis with your good morning to indicate your mood? Grow up, the job to do is the same one whether you're feeling rainy clouds or not, and I don't know what I'm supposed to do about it. (Caveat I'm nobody's manager, obviously if something really bad's going on you might want to mention it to them etc. and that's completely different & fine. It's the declaration of day to day feelings of being on top of the world or having got out of bed on the wrong side that wind me up.)

On many occasions I've wished for Slack to have a kind of 'filter' blocking feature - presumably the authors at least and perhaps others like these messages; maybe I'm even alone in not liking them - it would be good if I could define searches essentially, that if a message matched would be automatically hidden from view and never notify, regardless of @mention or channel notification settings. Then everyone can be happy. (Not just for these kinds of messages, but also say bots too - where some people find value in GitHub bot messages for example, I need to be in the channel, but I use github.com/notifications for all that and don't need or want it in the channel.)

That's an interesting point. I'd never do these at work where I primarily use Slack.

I do these things in group chats with people I'm friends with and care about and actually spend time with in real life.

> Good mornings. Where it's a norm to post "Good morning" or equivalent at the start of your day

Those a certain age will remember UGT ("Universal Greeting Time") from IRC. It's always morning when you enter the channel, always evening when you leave.

We do the "good morning", if we remember. It's just as much a way to signal that you're present. We're only a few, 5 to 7 depending on the day, and it's via IRC so it's hard to know if people are present or if it's just their bouncer.

It's just a private IRC channel, no bots, invite only and we all know each other from previous jobs or consulting gigs. Once in a while we'll track down an old co-worker who we miss or wonder what happened to, and invite them. Some pop in ever so often, some only once and others have ended up sticking around 24/7 (the core 5/6 people who are almost always around).

With the continued degradation of pretty much everything online that little IRC channel has become my favorite part of the internet. We can talk privately about politics, projects, home life and we support each other in our new jobs.

1. & 3. I hate all channels and everyone who does that. Useless and distracting. Hence I never hung around in general chatter channels..

#2 is one of those things like wishing happy birthday on Facebook: once there’s a hint or automation involved, it becomes absolutely meaningless.

If it’s organic, then it is indeed a great starter

#1 and #3 are absolutely terrible and I leave any channel filled with pointless noise like that.

Chat group rituals and expectations are objectively the worst parts of chat groups. The same goes for most closed community groups.

I love group chats, but I’d instantly leave or mute any of them forever if “good mornings” ever became a thing there.

And I’d like to suggest an alternative to a mindless “good morning”: Actually share something noteworthy or check in with the people in there! Share an observation of your surroundings, an article or cartoon that made you (actually) smile etc.

Too hard/time consuming? Then the “good morning” was disingenuous/formulaic anyway and likely served no purpose.

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