No Hello: A New Wave
I disagree.  I start text chats with &quot;hello&quot; all the time.<p>It basically relates to channel choice.  For some kinds of messages a near-real-time text chat is the right channel but async email-like flow would be entirely the wrong channel.<p>So I start a convo with &quot;hello&quot; to probe if the other party is available for near-real-time text chat, because away-status indicators are frequently unreliable.<p>There are also special kinds of communication needs like if I need help with something and there are 3 people who could potentially help me out on something that&#x27;s a blocker for me.  I then just want to probe for the first person capable of unblocking me.  The protocol is then something like:  &quot;me-to-person-a: hello&quot;.  wait for 5 minutes.  no respone.  &quot;me-to-person-b: hello&quot;.  wait for 5 minutes.  no response.  &quot;me-to-person-c: hello&quot;  wait for 5 minutes.  all of a sudden person b has become available and replies &quot;person-b-to-me: hello, what can i do for you?&quot;  ...now i start chatting with person b.  meanwhile, 20 minutes after my initial prompt when I&#x27;m already well into my way, discussing my blocker with person b, person c comes online and says &quot;hello&quot;.  I respond &quot;oh, never mind: person b is already helping me out&quot;.  ...person a, as it happens, is fighting a production issue and not responding to me right now, knowing that i&#x27;m a newbie developer who likely has newbie questions.  fair enough, he&#x27;s entirely within his rights to ignore me.<p>If instead, I just open the convo with a drawn-out description of the issue i need help with, I&#x27;m kind of stuck after firing off a message to the first person.  Because now, I don&#x27;t want to start wasting another person&#x27;s time by &quot;cross-posting&quot; to a second 1-on-1 chat, as that is likely to duplicate work.  In that case, to be polite, I&#x27;d have to at least wait a few hours, cross-post to a second person, and then say to the first person something like &quot;oh, it seems like you&#x27;re unavailable.  actually never mind, I guess person-b might be able to help me out faster&quot;.  ...this latter kind of communication is kind of awkward, and in any case inefficient.