About chat etiquette: it is a proof-of-humanity protocol
A short page arguing that the manners here are not manners.
The conventions, and what they are all doing
Say a word rather than waving. Show an object rather than describing one. Name the weather where you are. React to something the other person did rather than opening with a question. Each of those is called politeness and none of them is.
- A spoken word is harder to fake cheaply than a gesture, which can sit in a loop.
- An object held up is evidence of a room and of a hand.
- The weather is unforgeable in the moment and free to supply.
- Reacting requires having perceived something, and perceiving is precisely what a script cannot do.
Read the list again and the pattern is obvious. These are not courtesies. They are the cheapest available proofs that somebody is there, invented by users because no interface ever supplied one.
Which explains the things that feel rude and are not
Being skipped in two seconds is not an insult; it is somebody who has not yet received a proof and has no reason to wait for one. Being asked something oddly specific in the first minute is not intrusive; it is a test.
Somebody asked me what was on the wall behind me, which I took for nosiness and was in fact the only question that could not be answered by a recording.
noted in the first month
What follows if you are learning the conventions
- Supply a proof in the first line rather than a greeting.
- Prefer anything that requires perceiving them — a remark about what is behind them works better than anything about yourself.
- Do not perform competence; a slightly clumsy opening is itself a proof and a polished one is not.
Which is why the etiquette here looks nothing like the etiquette anywhere else, and why importing manners from ordinary social life does so badly. The problem being solved is different.