Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

nohello.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 362 posts

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#111

Post by kijin »

jonbronson wrote: post #68
JulianMorrison wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wanting a synchronous conversation is a pretty arrogant grab of someone else's time. This is also why phoning me is bad and please use texts like a civilised person.

That's pretty presumptive. There are any number of factors that might make a synchronous conversation desirable or even necessary. Merely seeking that out implies nothing about how someone values other people's time.

Although synchronous conversation is often desirable, there are different ways to initiate it.

IMO it's more polite to use an async channel first to ask if the other party is available for a phone call, and if not, schedule a phone call for a specific time. Like, I'd love to talk with you about that problem this afternoon, but right now I'm too busy debugging another problem.

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#112

Post by ninad »

jasode wrote: post #33

>People who do this are generally trying to be polite by not jumping right into the request, like one would in person or on the phone - and that's great! Different people have different reasons but I notice that many people that do a naked "hi" / "hey" are trying to see if the receiver is present for an immediate reply. In other words, the sender deliberately wants a synchronous instead of asynchronous convo. They do…

Coincidentally, I created hellomenot.com to solve a similar problem i experienced at work. My observation is as follows:

Why do people leave it at Hello? Conversations are the most natural way of communicating – when talking to someone in-person, one often starts talking only after we have their full attention, we wait for them to either nod, or make a sound, or look at you, right? now, because chatting on tools like Flock or Slack is very similar like talking in person – our brain is hard wired to wait before we have the attention of the person we’re talking to.

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#113

Post by BrandoElFollito »

hezag wrote: post #107
BrandoElFollito wrote: post #53

I ALWAYS say hello as the first thing in any chats that have some kind of importance. Why? because the person may be presenting to 200 people and my message will be displayed. They may be with someone and they cannot communicate. If this is a message of the kind "lunch at 12?" then fine, but anything remotely sensitive starts with hello, and I wait for that person to respond.

You can just ask the person to let you know when they are available to talk to you. This way you are less prone to interrupt the person and also don't expose sensitive information.

It may be a cultural thing. This is a very usual thing to do in my company, and anything outside of chit-chat (or non-sensitive info) is handled this way.

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#115

Post by plandis »

Saying “hello” with no immediate follow up is just as useless as saying “I have a problem” without context. It provides no useful/actionable information and just shows how little the person saying hello values your time because it forces your attention and prevents you from prioritizing an answer efficiently.

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#116

Post by _underfl0w_ »

jtr1 wrote: post #90

I get a lot of these and try to assume that it's the person wanting to be polite. Starting a conversation without a greeting is very rude in a lot of cultures. But yes, it's annoying in chat form, and especially when the conversation is left dangling. Depending on the situation, I'll write out what I'd like to say, then copy it before starting off with a "hello". If the person starts typing, I'm ready to follow up wi…

The emoji symbols seem like a good idea, but unfortunately just because its the first time you've communicated with a person for the day, doesn't mean that they _aren't_ incredibly busy.

We may have different work cultures, but I used to report to someone who would lead with a bare "Hey!" and I eventually found that if I waited long enough she would either elaborate or the issue would go away. Somehow I don't think that was her actual plan.

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#119

Post by bobm_kite9 »

This is generally true. However, sometimes I like to ‘bury’ a hard-to-answer question in a follow up. The reason is, if you ask the question straight off, people have the option of pretending they haven’t seen it. They can’t do that if you’ve already exchanged pleasantries and made the conversation synchronous. Devious, I know.

Re: Please don't say just hello in chat (2013)

#120

Post by dvtrn »

_underfl0w_ wrote: post #109
ballenf wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a great use case for a slack bot. Monitor for naked hellos and show a link to this page. That way it’s not personal.

I think you are legitimately on to something. I may actually build that this week if I get some downtime. It would need to be _polite_ though since most people who do this do seem to be generally well-meaning, if unwittingly annoying.

Slackbot has an autoresponder / custom response feature built in. Sadly you can’t gate it to PMs.

Please share if you do build it, I’ve been looking for a PM auto responder for vacations. They exist but many of them are bundled to other services with features I don’t care about and come at a cost that’s more than I want to pay for just the one feature of actual interest.

Post reply on HN