Hacker News Reader

Comment by corty | Hacker News Reader

Refusing politely takes time and effort. Ignoring less so. And about the rudeness: The person emailing was rude in the first place, being rude in return is never a problem. They didn't read the README or FAQ and ignored the official channels and means.

Of course it is possible to be "nice" and earn a few bucks on the side by making it a paid request. But i.m.e. it is rarely worthwile, most start an argument after receiving the consulting offer which can only be ended by ignoring them after all. And those people are usually the bad kind of customers, complaining about rates, hours, wanting free side requests, "tax-free" invoices, etc.

I've tried this (for a short while) and will never do it again. Ignoring them is actually the kindest way to do things, to them (you prevent them from wasting their time) and mostly to yourself.

View on HN

I find ignoring requests/emails etc. perfectly fine and point about person emailing being rude in the first place is spot on. Specially in context of asking for help with things that are in FAQ.

I think parent poster was never in a position where he really has to set priorities and never tried to be polite to 1000 people in a single day.

> never tried to be polite to 1000 people in a single day

Funny, I thought this was a software orientated site. /s

Seriously though, copy/paste is fine. Autoresponders are fine, especially if noted as such in the email response. An automated response is better than no response.

Auto response is not politeness.

Automated response is better if one expects confirmation of delivery and then more specific response.

I would be mad at a person that sets "will get back to you soon" as auto reply and never follows up. On the other hand what would be auto response when you don't want to respond? Something like "Hi, we got your message, don't expect hearing from us. Have a nice day!" that is even more rude.

>being rude in return is never a problem

Conceptually it is always a problem. This is how communication degrades and descends into chaos.

Quite the opposite. Learning can only happen, if there is some kind of feedback. If the other side doesn't notice that something is off in our communication, because I do not signal displeasure about their rudeness by being rude myself, they cannot change their behaviour.

Most of the communication in the internet degrades, because information flow is lacking. If you answer politely, you can, when meeting in person, still convey an air of annoyance. You can signal the other person more than just what is being said. In written communication, this doesn't work. All the polite subtleties will be missed. All the cultural cues, like being overly polite or formal to signal distance, don't work because there are just too many cultures meeting, and you can't calibrate your interpretation to the other side like you do "at home".

This means that in the internet, you need to be more direct. You need to say what you mean. And if you need to dismiss somebody, you need to be explicitly dismissive. If somebody is rude, you need to be rude and tell them about their rudeness. Being polite for the sake of politeness is misleading, inducing the other side to continue their errorneous behaviour up to the point where things really degrade into an unpleasant situation.

Fully agree.

From a technical perspective: Ignoring leaves the loop open. I don't know: - if you ignore it on purpose - or if you don't want to solve it or - or if you don't have time or - or if you just missed it ...

That's when I would re-send the message or do something else. A Win-Win would be sending a small "won't-fix" or whatever.

> Ignoring leaves the loop open

Often that's what you want! Maybe I don't want to reject your bug report outright, maybe I'll get around to it in a few weeks or months or years. Or not, I dunno.

I've had my own issues and bugfix PRs on small projects ignored, that's fine. Nobody should ever have the expectation of a response on that kind of project.

The parents are talking about ignoring as a method to (implicitily) say no.

Ignoring: for the maintainer: open loop or maybe hidden closed loop (e.g. afraid of confrontation); for the requester: open loop.

The intention of saying no is a closed loop.

> Nobody should ever have the expectation...

Yes, but that's not a pragmatic solution. People sometimes DO have the expectation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com