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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

The primary purpose of going out with your friends to the pub is social interaction. If the purpose was just to get drunk most efficiently, you'd sit at home alone and pour vodka down your gaping maw.

The purpose of talking to your friends is social interaction. If the purpose of being friends was to extract information in the most efficient manner possible, you'd replace them with Wikipedia.

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The idea that you would consider your friend a buzzkill because they used IMDB is the type of nightmare fuel social anxiety is made of.

You don't think it'd be fun to hear everyone guess and then someone looks up the answer? Sounds like trivia to me.

Yes, sure, it’s to be social. But if someone asks a stupid trivia question, then just give them the answer. You’re not starting a discussion with a stupid trivia question. You are truly weird.

If in some social interaction they ask such question I expect them to actually want to know the answer. If not the question should not be asked. The answer to question can lead discussion to some place.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that it's not fine to eventually look up the answer to the question. But chatting about it before it gets to that point, and exhausting your guesses is much more fun than someone looking up answers to every question someone poses that doesn't have an obvious answer within a few seconds.

Then formulate it as a conversation starter not as explicit question like was done here. Only a buzzkill makes such explicit conversation starters. Unless it is a trivia night...

"Remember that movie where" or "remember oh that guy who was in that movie" would both imply this. "Who was the actor in oh that movie where" is clearly a cry for exact answer as quickly as possible.

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