Hacker News Reader

Comment by hdkwowjdj | Hacker News Reader

It's a social cost question, I guess.

Your signal: I don't care enough about our communication to use WhatsApp, because of reasons that are obscure to 99% outside a tech community. Similarly, they don't bother to reach out to you on other communication channels, because they don't bother enough.

The important thing to understand is, from your communication partners point of view, you create a burden without reason, so they work around it in (their) most effective way.

I've been there and didn't support this or that messenger. By now I think, the only way to solve those kind of issues are i) sane laws that regulate privacy and communication security, and ii) trends that create a need for a new communication style - private, secure, and human (like, calling from time to time, find a better solution to ghosting, things like that).

I'm convinced that we need positive incentives for that, instead of creating artificial burden.

View on HN

Oh yes, I wasn't trying to imply that any party was at fault here - just that the outcome is unfortunate.

This isn't just limited to communications tools. For example, people might have dietary restrictions for non-health reasons (religion, environmental impact, etc) that others do not share or even understand. I don't mind accommodating those (to a limit) e.g. when picking a place to eat, but it is a burden placed on people around them. That's just the way it is, I guess, and I suppose all people can do is try to minimise the burden, and to be accepting of those placed upon you.

One needs to work on explaining the reasoning to the others in one's group, and providing tech support so they too can embrace the freedoms one enjoys

> The important thing to understand is, from your communication partners point of view, you create a burden without reason

They create a burden without reason.

He was making a point about empathy that you seemed to miss.

Perhaps I missed this point - but if the empathy point exists, the other side did not show empathy, either.

I think that both sides create a burden. In my opinion, the difference is that, it is a one-to-many kind of matching scenario. One person (the one opting out of using the preferred messaging method of all their friends) creates a burden to many people, while all those people create a burden just for one person.

If it helps, you can try visualizing it as a fully connected graph that initially has equally weighted edges between all nodes. But then the weight of all edges connected to one specific node goes up by multiple factors. That node loses out much more than all the other nodes.

> I think that both sides create a burden. In my opinion, the difference is that, it is a one-to-many kind of matching scenario. One person (the one opting out of using the preferred messaging method of all their friends) creates a burden to many people, while all those people create a burden just for one person.

I personally rather observe various groups in society with very different kinds of preferences.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com