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Comment by ptrincr | Hacker News Reader

This is very true. How much do you share before boring people?

Easiest way to do this is to roughly time how long they spoke for and contribute back the same amount. If you do it right, you'll wind up spending 50% of the conversation talking and 50% listening, which is a reasonable split :)

I find that this is just naive. A lot of people aren't very comfortable sharing things. I'm relatively open, and don't mind telling people about how some dumbass swung open his car door into the bike lane when I was riding into work this morning. My less open coworkers like the idle conversation, they smile and follow the story -- they just don't have much to add, or any desire to share their own stories. So what can you do? Force a conversation? Every once in a while, sure, but it seems to me it's better to let them speak when they're ready.

You don't have to talk about yourself in a conversation :P this probably feeds back into the 'don't interview someone' mentality, but just talk about something in the news or other recent developments. Have they watched Daredevil (s1 or s2)? Which Zelda game was their favourite? Even though politics have been ruled out as a generally safe conversation topic, it's still fun to ask someone their opinion of Trump (wall/no wall/half-height but with barbed wire).

So I propose the following. Instead of using the simple heuristic of talking half the time which will work with nearly everyone practically always (modulo some edge cases when people have literally no strong opinions about anything), use the wealth of your experience as a human being to establish when and when not to promote complex human social interaction, additionally taking into account contextual and mitigating factors, while simultaneously ensuring that all parties are satisfied with the level and intensity of discourse instead of taking some random Internet person's sound bite advice.

True many people aren't comfortable sharing things immediately, but much psychology on reciprocation tells us that your sharing things about yourself opens them up, moderated by their personality, mood, the context, and a bunch of more variables. Sharing about yourself (not too much, and listening and being genuinely interested in finding out about them without the interviewing barrage), is a great way to develop a rapport.

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