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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if you're not a native English speaker, but 'please do X' is not a polite way to ask someone to do something in English. I know it looks like it is if you look up 'please' in the dictionary, but it really doesn't sound like it in practice to native ears. You made a blunt demand, not a polite request.

Also since your username is 'BossingAround' and you were literally bossing someone around in your comment they may think you're a troll account.

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Completely disagree as a native English speaker. "Please do foo" is polite. "Please pickup milk after work", "Please forgive me", "Please create a SSL cert for your website".

Tangentially: Same thing happens in code reviews. People become extra soft at objective reasoning!!! The onus is on the offendee, not the offender. Stop being offended so much all the time, you'll live a healthier, happier life. Special treatment, feeling of being entitled for politeness is a slipper slope where everyone is being nice to each other and no one can criticize. Nothing gets done. We don't make progress together like this.

Advice to the sender: Be polite, but assertive. Don't make personal attacks.

Advice to the receiver: Assume good intentions, focus on problem at the hand, accept harsh criticism, don't be offended at little things.

The world would be a better place.

Why would the onus be on the offendee? The person making the request or giving the feedback is the person that has the most opportunity to choose their method of affect their communication. The receiver has very little choice, except sucking it up stoically.

If you really want to communicate an idea, it's in your own best interest to adapt your approach to the listener.

I think I’d always say ‘would you mind picking up some milk’. ‘Please pickup milk’ sounds blunt to the point of mocking sarcasm! Maybe it’s cultural.

I think the amount of energy you've spent on this thread convincing others of what you find offensive is worrying, but you've also taken my comment out of context.

Yeah I agree, if you end the sentence abruptly it sounds blunt. Just replace it with "Please pick up milk on the way home" and it sounds normal. But that's not what I said.

I can't believe we all have spent so much energy, downvotes, and bikeshedding including myself. This is surely not efficient. Instigator is the offendee. What a disgrace!

I am a native English speaker and it seemed polite enough to me.

How would you phrase the request?

> Hi this is a great article! I don't know if you've ever considered adding TLS to your personal site? I know a lot of people like me really appreciate even small websites having this.

The shit sandwich always works!

This sounds as fake as "marketing-speak".

There's nothing wrong with asking "Please do <something>" in the English language, it's plenty polite.

It's not marketing speak. It's getting off on the right foot by saying you like the person's work. Then it's asking more carefully if they've considered it before, in case they have and decided against or weren't able to. Then it's saying you'd appreciate it rather than you require it.

Just saying 'please do X' sounds like an email I'd get from a German who doesn't know English very well. It's grammatically correct but it's really all wrong.

I'm Dutch speaker, we're known to be very direct, but I too believe adding "Please" in front of a request does not per se make it more polite. Another example that bothers me quite a lot is adding "Thanks" to a request without awaiting a reply. Writing "Can you please do xyz? Thanks" makes it come over as an instruction instead of a request, even though the author may have had the best intentions (express his gratitude). Or maybe I'm just overly sensitive ;)

One of the things I love about some European cultures is that they carry over their natural bluntness when they speak English, my partner is Hungarian and to English ears her way of speaking is blunt to the point of trauma, I think it’s great, I far prefer people just get to the point particularly when they are asking for something.

I am really not a fan of saccharine sweet false politeness.

With a Slavic language as my first, I generally feel like adding “please” or “thanks” makes a request canned-polite; essentially it distances the speaker from the receiver. That said, the effect could be adjusted with carefully chosen intonation.

Often a direct request would feel friendlier, unless receiver is particularly insecure/on the defensive. Sandwiching it between appreciative words is most foolproof, but I find it time-consuming to do in a genuine way.

We Brazilians use it. It’s because it is the way we talk in Portuguese.

I'm just curious what you would consider marketing-speak then. To my eyes, your phrasing seems to veer off into the other extreme towards seeming patronising and insincere. And it is pretty clear that you want essentially the same thing as the person who said "please do X".

Maybe "please consider adding TLS because ... " is a good compromise? Still not a foot-stomping demand but you're stating why it would be better for all involved while not treating the subject as a child.

Personally I would even leave off the "because ..." because I'm a non-native speaker and happy to be taken as a little abrasive.

Counterpoint, I often enjoy conversing with Europeans because it less often sounds like they are bullshitting and more often they just directly say what they mean, compared to fellow American born folks.

Are you from UK?

Lol yes.

Saying "Could you kindly ..." is explicitly less demanding than "Please ...".

Seems like unnecessarily much ass kissing for a simple request.

IMO, "Please x" is a plenty polite way to ask for x in English, and "I am not going to x" is not rude at all

I always fail to understand when people shy away from simplicity in communication.

How long until we replace `wontfix` tags with `I totally would but I already have a thing that day`

They're not shying away from simplicity, but from ambiguity, especially when the range of possible interpretations includes being a jerk. We don't have nonverbal channels to communicate in this format, unlike in person, where positive intent has many easy ways to come across. Here the only channel we have is words, so it needs to be explicit in words. The burden is on the commenter to disambiguate.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

(Doubly so when the message is off-topic and double again when it's a cliché.)

Thanks for this. Non-native speakers of English trip this one up a lot. This entire phenomenon of "please" is worthy of its own article.

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