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Comment by doug_durham | Hacker News Reader

I would consider the approach in this posting to be rude. I feel like they are shoving a bunch of information at me without context. Part of the purpose of the salutation is to allow the call receiver to orient themselves. “Who is calling?” “How urgent is this?” “Do I have time to talk now?”

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With async communication, the expectation is that they can generally take as long as they need. You put your message and maybe they'll get back to you then or in 5 minutes or in an hour, etc, but they have all the information to orient themselves on their own time.

If you just go "hello" and have this synchronous chat, then there isn't time to orient yourself, because the expectation is to respond as if you're in a face-to-face convo.

The thing with a messaging "hello" is it doesn't provide much of that information. You're only able to evaluate the time commitment and urgency by having the content of the request - a "Hello" ping on instant messenger is an attention stealer but it prevents the reader from being able to triage. It commits them to paying attention and waiting for at least part of a conversation that they may or may not have time for.

This is about chats, not calls though - you can look at the context and make the same determination.

Even for calls, "hey, do you have a sec to help me troubleshoot the CDN setup?" is way better than "hello," followed by a call if you respond.

If it's a voice call, yes. But for text, folks can put the entire thing into a single message. Now you have all that data you need in one go, and you can decide if and when to answer in your own time.

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