4 ms·

Saying "you're welcome" without a "thank you" preceding will sound passive aggressive to quite a lot of people; it's the type of thing that a parent does to chi

by saghm 2mo ago

Saying "you're welcome" without a "thank you" preceding will sound passive aggressive to quite a lot of people; it's the type of thing that a parent does to chide a small child who forgets their manners in the same way they might prompt a child with "What's the magic word?" if they grabbed at something without saying please. If this doesn't make sense to you, I'm not sure there's much anyone can do to convince you, because it's purely social convention. It's certainly possible that the author didn't realize it either, but having to deal with reactions about word choice when putting out writing explicitly for public consumption kinda comes with the territory. This goes for Hacker News comments too of course, but as someone with no horse in this race, your interference about their word choice seems like much more of a stretch than theirs about the author. Not recognizing that a title to a blog post will evoke a negative reactions in a lot of readers does genuinely seem like information about the author socially in a way that having that common negative reaction does not.

Dylan16807 2mo ago
How is a thank you supposed to precede it in a blog post? The social convention is for conversations.
- saghm 2mo ago
  It literally can't precede it, that's the entire point that's being made; it sounds rude in a blog post because the social expectations are being violated. When social convention says a phrase is rude in certain circumstances, and those circumstances are not (or cannot) be met, then social convention say that the phrase is rude. You seem incredulous at the idea that some things that might be socially acceptable in conversational circumstances would not be perceived similarly in published writing, but I don't really understand why. There are all sorts of things that might not cause someone to bat an eye in a spoken conversation that are much more difficult to use in writing.
  - Dylan16807 2mo ago
    You say that expectation is violated here, I say it doesn't apply here. I don't think we're going to resolve this difference in view. But please stop making wild guesses about how I handle broad categories of communication when I'm commenting on one specific case. I don't say it doesn't make sense. I'm not incredulous. That's really obnoxious.
    - saghm 2mo ago
      Verbatim, you said: > The social convention is for conversations. > How is a thank you supposed to precede it in a blog post? That's a pretty clear distinction between a blog post and conversations. Now you're saying: > But please stop making wild guesses about how I handle broad categories of communication when I'm commenting on one specific case. I don't say it doesn't make sense. I'm not incredulous. That's really obnoxious. I honestly have no clue what you're even trying to say at this point. You don't seem to want to say it directly, and yet you're now claiming I'm being obnoxious for trying to figure it out. > I don't think we're going to resolve this difference in view. That's the one thing we can agree on, since from my perspective, you're being a lot more obnoxious by pretty much treating people the exact same way you've been complaining about the entire time.
      - Dylan16807 2mo ago
        You took what I said about a single situation and tried to extrapolate it into entire categories of your choosing. That's why you're confused. Don't do that and you won't be confused. I have been very direct. You're trying to make it more indirect when you try to generalize like this. And throwing out "if this doesn't make sense to you", or "you seem incredulous" about the entire existence of certain social norms that apply in some situations but not others, is a bad way of trying to figure out what I mean; it's rude. Edit: An analogy: I have a critique about a type of waffle and you imply I don't understand the purpose of baked goods in general. This is not a good way to converse and the confusion is not my fault.
        saghm 2mo ago
        You're making it sound like suggesting that "blog posts" are a category of "writing" is some sort of random arbitrary choice on my part, and yet you've still refused to elaborate on how or why you think they're different. You're continuing to take issue with oddly specific parts of how I've phrased things and yet continue to use plenty of phrasings that sound at least as rude to me as anything I've said. I don't think you've been direct at all about anything relating to the actual original conversation; the only things you've been direct about are in telling me or others that we're wrong and pointing out the things you think we've been doing wrong (along with a random assumption about someone else's life based on the comment they initially made), and then proceeded to take issue with every instance where someone else does the exact same things. It's pretty much impossible phrase this point because you have gotten upset any time I happen to incidentally phrase something using the second person pronoun, but I'll try my best: when person A says something, and person B doesn't understand it, that's not sufficient evidence to conclude that person A or person B is at fault. Communication doesn't exist in only one direction. Sometimes it might be because person B did a bad job understanding, but sometimes it's also because person A did a bad job communicating. In the scenarios where person A happened to do a bad job, it's pretty common for them not to realize, because if they did realize, they would follow up by clarifying. It's pretty much impossible for person A to know whether they communicated clearly or not without some other person to interpret it, because communication that isn't interpreted in some way by someone else isn't actually communication.

by saghm 2mo ago

Dylan16807 2mo ago

How is a thank you supposed to precede it in a blog post? The social convention is for conversations.

saghm 2mo ago
It literally can't precede it, that's the entire point that's being made; it sounds rude in a blog post because the social expectations are being violated. When social convention says a phrase is rude in certain circumstances, and those circumstances are not (or cannot) be met, then social convention say that the phrase is rude. You seem incredulous at the idea that some things that might be socially acceptable in conversational circumstances would not be perceived similarly in published writing, but I don't really understand why. There are all sorts of things that might not cause someone to bat an eye in a spoken conversation that are much more difficult to use in writing.
- Dylan16807 2mo ago
  You say that expectation is violated here, I say it doesn't apply here. I don't think we're going to resolve this difference in view. But please stop making wild guesses about how I handle broad categories of communication when I'm commenting on one specific case. I don't say it doesn't make sense. I'm not incredulous. That's really obnoxious.
  - saghm 2mo ago
    Verbatim, you said: > The social convention is for conversations. > How is a thank you supposed to precede it in a blog post? That's a pretty clear distinction between a blog post and conversations. Now you're saying: > But please stop making wild guesses about how I handle broad categories of communication when I'm commenting on one specific case. I don't say it doesn't make sense. I'm not incredulous. That's really obnoxious. I honestly have no clue what you're even trying to say at this point. You don't seem to want to say it directly, and yet you're now claiming I'm being obnoxious for trying to figure it out. > I don't think we're going to resolve this difference in view. That's the one thing we can agree on, since from my perspective, you're being a lot more obnoxious by pretty much treating people the exact same way you've been complaining about the entire time.
    - Dylan16807 2mo ago
      You took what I said about a single situation and tried to extrapolate it into entire categories of your choosing. That's why you're confused. Don't do that and you won't be confused. I have been very direct. You're trying to make it more indirect when you try to generalize like this. And throwing out "if this doesn't make sense to you", or "you seem incredulous" about the entire existence of certain social norms that apply in some situations but not others, is a bad way of trying to figure out what I mean; it's rude. Edit: An analogy: I have a critique about a type of waffle and you imply I don't understand the purpose of baked goods in general. This is not a good way to converse and the confusion is not my fault.
      - saghm 2mo ago
        You're making it sound like suggesting that "blog posts" are a category of "writing" is some sort of random arbitrary choice on my part, and yet you've still refused to elaborate on how or why you think they're different. You're continuing to take issue with oddly specific parts of how I've phrased things and yet continue to use plenty of phrasings that sound at least as rude to me as anything I've said. I don't think you've been direct at all about anything relating to the actual original conversation; the only things you've been direct about are in telling me or others that we're wrong and pointing out the things you think we've been doing wrong (along with a random assumption about someone else's life based on the comment they initially made), and then proceeded to take issue with every instance where someone else does the exact same things. It's pretty much impossible phrase this point because you have gotten upset any time I happen to incidentally phrase something using the second person pronoun, but I'll try my best: when person A says something, and person B doesn't understand it, that's not sufficient evidence to conclude that person A or person B is at fault. Communication doesn't exist in only one direction. Sometimes it might be because person B did a bad job understanding, but sometimes it's also because person A did a bad job communicating. In the scenarios where person A happened to do a bad job, it's pretty common for them not to realize, because if they did realize, they would follow up by clarifying. It's pretty much impossible for person A to know whether they communicated clearly or not without some other person to interpret it, because communication that isn't interpreted in some way by someone else isn't actually communication.