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Comment by hluska | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, only weirdos never speak to strangers. Social skills are easy, conversations are easy and strangers are just people you don’t know yet.

I still can’t understand the point of this. Do you get a charge telling social anxious people they’ll be weird if they do their homework? That’s precisely what you did. Why?

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I live in NYC. Maybe this is different in the suburbs. Nearly 100% of the people that approach me are trying to get something from me. Scam me, get me to sign something I don't want to sign, get me to donate my money to save the dogs/children/etc.

If someone on the street tries to talk to me, I try to avoid even looking at them or acknowledging them. They'll use that as an opening. Just keep walking.

I lived in NYC for a decade. This is very true on the street, but less true waiting in a subway station, and even less true in a neighborhood bar. The more public, there is a “market for lemons” effect in conversation. The more it resembles a private club or a group suffering a common injustice, the more reliably good the conversation is. A crowd on an MTA platform where a train hasn’t shown up in 50 minutes can get pretty chatty.

Well, that's your experience. Some people live in places where most strangers that talk to you are wierdos. Some of us live in places where most strangers on the street are actually dangerous (and I'm not talking about NYC or any place in America, I'm talking about actual criminal hotspots, which is the reality of a huge portion of humanity you probably don't think about).

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