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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Are you from UK?

Lol yes.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The shit sandwich always works!

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.)

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