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Comment by eropple | Hacker News Reader

That would be a problem between you and...you.

People are more important than "your time", and a failure to realize that is a dehumanization of the other party. The latter response demonstrates emotional sensitivity towards the other person in the conversation. Among most people, that is important. It makes the other party feel good. It reinforces that you do care about the other party enough to ensure that they are not potentially affronted by terse communication. This is why normal people, lacking in the self-absorption your post exudes, do this sort of thing.

And in any case it doesn't take more than a few seconds to write or read; when the hell did four sentences become a "bloody novel"?

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>And in any case it doesn't take more than a few seconds to write or read; when the hell did four sentences become a "bloody novel"?

Welcome to the generation of twitter. :)

Thing is, we're not in high school anymore. We're all adults here and we should be able to see the difference between being rude and being terse.

"potentially affronted" is not a thing I particularly care about. If I want to affront you, oh you'll know. Believe me.

More interestingly, the only people I've ever seen write email like in that example are people who send/receive less than about 5 emails a day. The more they have to process daily, the shorter their messages become.

> Thing is, we're not in high school anymore. We're all adults here and we should be able to see the difference between being rude and being terse.

In written contexts, there often isn't. Without what I would call a significant amount of personal history, there isn't enough data and there aren't nonverbal cues to demonstrate terseness versus rudeness. Many people will assume rudeness, because that's what that pattern generally looks like.

Also, there's the nerd stereotype of being a standoffish jerk to consider, which you are doing a bang-up job of reinforcing with crap like this:

> "potentially affronted" is not a thing I particularly care about. If I want to affront you, oh you'll know. Believe me.

This is the sort of thing I would expect a teenager in the throes of self-absorption to say. I say this because I did. Then I grew up.

You're being an asshole. You'll be happier if you stop.

> "You're being an asshole. You'll be happier if you stop."

Not at all. I've noticed a general uptick in happiness since I started taking people at face value and stopped worrying about walking on egg shells for no reason whatsoever.

You know what you get by trying too hard to be polite and making absolutely certain no feelings could possibly get hurt? The language bureaucrats use to say "Your tax basis this year is X" on two A4 pages.

I hate it when people beat around the bush. So I avoid doing it.

I think two key parts of what you said are "most people" and "normal people". This normativity is taken for granted here. Preference for terse messages is ultimately a matter of taste and I've yet to see evidence that one belongs to a clear majority.

It may not be a clear majority of people, but it's pretty obviously a majority of people who set expectations in public discourse. That's why it's normative.

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