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Comment by DebtDeflation | Hacker News Reader

I will never understand people who write "Hello" or "Hi Joe" in Slack and then just wait. It has to be some form of mental illness.

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If you spent even a nanosecond considering these other people, you might stumble upon the hypothesis that these people are trying to port the way they interact with others in meatspace to an IM channel, rather than assume some form of mental illness.

I think it's actually people bringing their norms from social instant messaging tools.

I could see that too, but in most f2f interactions, you also start with a greeting. What does the greeting accomplish? Nothing substantial, but it probably has some broader cultural value akin to establishing goodwill or the like.

And if those people stopped for a nanosecond and considered other people, they might come to realization that an IM is not the same as meatspace, and maybe there needs to be some adjustment to an async model.

Also, giving context is good, regardless of medium.

If you really think that people are going to break the widespread cultural norm of greeting others at the beginning of a social interaction because of some grumpy engineers, youre gonna have a bad time

They are well meaning, but they just don't realize this is async communication. They only know direct, sync communication. This is one signal that tells me they are junior (even after years of "experience").

It's especially taxing for me because it means I can't concentrate on what I'm doing until I reply to them.

If I know the "Hi Joe" is hanging there, part of my focus is holding onto it until I clear it.

It's why I don't use IM and just block myself off on those platforms. If it's not meaningful enough to write in an email then it's not meaningful enough for me to read.

Huh, we have really different experiences. I often describe things the other way. My email is full of automated messages, things that get blasted out to the entire organization, status updates that got sent to an entire mailing list and I don't need to read. I assume at this point that if it's an email, it's probably not important. That is to say P(important | email) < my threshold

I mean, I glace at them at some point, but I don't put much thought into them.

At least I know slack/teams messages are meant for me. If it's important, don't send me an email about it, ping me on one of those.

I have my emails well filtered. For me, It's Slack/Teams that's full of useless groups of inane chatter and DMs that pop up and annoy me.

It is like calling someone and saying hello in the voicemail.

Except that it is not, because it is not voicemail.

You're not the only one who hates it - https://nohello.net/en/

Honestly, I just ignore the conversation until they post something meaningful.

The “hey Joe” catalyst types often expect a “I got that X for you” response.

They correctly assume you don’t need a public reminder for your responsibilities so they opt for a subtle nudge.

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