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Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

I like the "hello" before someone engages in a chat because this way I can confirm that i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe (i.e. I am not displaying in front of 200 people and forgot to switch off IM).

If someone just wants to send me an information, email is great for that.

My personal order of contacts is snail mail → email → IM → phone → in person. Each of the steps is one order of magnitude of urgency greater than the previous one.

There is probably also a cultural component.

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I guarantee you are annoying people with this. “Hello” conveys no information, you might as well say “tag”.

“Hello, could we set a time to chat about xyz” lets the reader give a meaningful response when available (and maybe thats immediate)

I simply ignore hellos but happily respond to questions.

And I guarantee that others are annoyed when folks leap in with no lead in. And I am annoyed at people who ignore messages, even a basic “hello”. Seems pretty rude.

You can add the 'hello' to the message. Just don't press send in between!

Yes exactly this!

It's possible to be polite while being mindful of how many interrupts you are causing another person.

> And I am annoyed at people who ignore messages, even a basic “hello”. Seems pretty rude.

Good! If you went up to someone in person who is in flow state and say HELLO! you'll probably get a rude response too.

> i) I am available to talk and ii) the message is safe

If I’m at work, I’m always going to be available to talk, and anyway, nothing is lost by them sending me what they want to say and me responding when I become available.

I’m of the opinion that you shouldn’t ever send messages that are unsafe for 200 of your colleagues to see.

If you want to know if the person can chat right now, you can always say "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now?"

Every other time when you don't need to know that, you can still not get all the problems of the empty "hello" message.

I always want to know that because I do not want to send messages when it is not a good time for that. Nor I want to receive any.

A "hello" means it is "IM urgent" so it can wait for the moment I am OK to exchange.

Like I said, this is also cultural - some cultures allow people to interrupt others, some not.

I don't want to wait there and stare in typing icon while you are typing and retyping and figuring out what you want to send.

That is why hello is annoying. People are capable to talk immediately, but take forever to finish writing.

The solution here would be for Microsoft to add a "hello will be ignored" option to Teams so I can just check that and have it look like Teams is saying back to them " please write more then just hello "

It does not work that way in my place. You write "hello" and if there is no immediate "hello" back, then you leave this aside until there is. There is no staring at anything.

August 21, 2022

Re: your messages in this thread

Dear BrandoElFollito:

You're rebuilding TCP over UDP. Chat apps are connectionless (or RESTful, if you will). What makes them productive, especially in the workplace, is the fact that they can work without all the handshaking that accompanies more structured communication like in-person, spoken human conversations.

Nothing is stopping you from adding back all your binds, listens, SYNs, and ACKs to a protocol that doesn't need them. But it's a conversational code smell if you do.

Sincerely yours,

sowbug

Dear sowbug - apparently you live in a place where it is fine to send a message and it does not matter if the recipient is ready to receive it or not. Good for you.

Dear sowbug, i only got 100 characters of your message. Could you please send it again?

How would you manage that via telephone?

Sending Hello this way seems like calling somebody and if they answer it's ok to interrupt.

Being responsive doesn't mean you're idle.

The phone is the last but one "urgency" level. It means that if someone calls me on the phone it is really urgent. I would interrupt a lot of things, including a presentation, if I get a call.

If this is to say something minor I will block that person, or never pick up their call again.

I see, however, that you're rudely just communicating here without telling people hello first, and waiting for a reply to know they're available to converse.

Exactly! You may have noticed that this forum is not an IM chat. Glad you noted the difference.

Neither is slack :)

Try: "Oh, hello. Do you have time for a short chat right now about a database schema change?”

I almost always have time to fight fires — unless busy with a larger conflagration. I may or may not have the time to debate the finer points of table naming conventions however.

Without context I might say yes and then have to take it back once I discover the topic.

This. There are many conversations I am happy to have, many not.

Hello without a context is ignored.

Hello with a context empowers me to make a decision about how my day will go.

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