My former colleague, Betsy Langowski, on Mastodon a few days ago:

People who send you a message in an asynchronous communication medium (Slack, Teams, etc.) that just says some variation on “hi” should be sent directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

This unforgivable desecration of my direct messages has been a perennial pet peeve. It was a near-daily occurrence at Apple—especially after Slack rolled out to the entire company in 2019 or 2020. I even briefly added “nohello.net” to my Slack bio. Didn’t help.

It is not a new phenomenon, of course: my frustrations date back to telephone small talk. You called me for a reason, bub. Get on with it!

In 2013, a clearly annoyed person got one too many “hi!”s and created NoHello.com (hosted on Blogger!) to help stem the tide, but it was clearly insufficient.

Others tried again in 2020 with No-Hello.com and NoHello.net (both surely in reaction to the flood of new work-from-home-ers breaching basic Slack or Teams etiquette), but still to no avail. No doubt there are dozens of these microsites and bots, scattered across the internet, each quixotically preaching to a population mired in anachronistic notions of “nicety.”

My personal hell? “Hi, I have a question…”—followed by crickets. I’d often return from a meeting to find at least one of these indolently staring back at me. My “aaugh!” was probably audible throughout the building.

I sometimes got them while I was at my desk, and I’d wait to see how long it’d be before they followed up. I once had someone knock on my door and say “I pinged you on Slack, but you didn’t respond. Can I ask you a question?”

They never found the body.