I think a more helpful frame is seeing this less as a practice of rhetoric and to instead see it as a practice of emotional maturity.
When you speak with someone, you likely are not aware of everything that is going on with their current emotional state. If they're having a good day or bad, if they even have had the time to build insight on it, what's nagging at them, etc. You may also not know where their ideologies, ethics, morality, etc are since these are only really shared with the ones close to them. And even then these shift and ebb especially if someone is at a formative time of their life (eg a college student).
So every initial conversation is a little back-and-forth of mapping this out, warming up, and saving the deeper stuff for later. It's a trust-building exercise where you suss out if someone will be receptive, if they'll validate your experience of the world or if they're more likely to be closed off and dismissive. Because the latter hurts and that hurt can last longer than you expect.
I personally don't find small talk rejuvenating and used to get bored of it quickly. I think the thing that irked me was that I always saw myself as open-minded and receptive and it felt like a waste of time, just get to the point, etc. But these days I'm keenly aware that we're not all at the same place internally and someone may have had some less-than-ideal experiences they're still holding onto. I can be sympathetic to that even if it means I'm bored for a few minutes of my day - it's really the least that I can do.
Being trustworthy and being perceived as trustworthy aren't the same thing. I think a lot of us who dislike small talk forget that the other person hasn't necessarily had a chance to establish the former yet.
(Getting to the point:) I once heard a perfect explanation of the small talk phenomenon. It's like two modems establishing a link: they send to each other signals that are intended to asses how the line behaves, how well the other side hears you, and what it supports. Thus small talk may never be a pithy conversation: its purpose is to be a formal, predictable, zero-surprise exchange. Skipping it and going straight to the point may result in a badly botched communication attempt.
It could be. Or maybe she just wanted to enjoy his company for a while, fly around in the clouds until she had to make her final approach and make sure to stick the landing.
It's like letting a cat sniff your hand or get used to your presence. We're smelling each other out at a subconscious level.
And more concretely, you're determining someone's values before offending them. Through small talk you might discover they're more conservative. Maybe they're hippies at heart. Maybe they hate dark humor, maybe they love it.
If you know those things, you can choose which serious conversations you'd like to have and which you'd better avoid. Plus the process of sniffing each other out means there's more baseline trust going in.
Indeed. There may be surprises (a new joke!), but no, so to say, meta-surprises: the list of topics is known not to surprise or offend. Current weather, light jokes, general news about recent movies, mentions of sports events in passing, superficial talk about how weekends went, etc.
If somebody gets into discussing the current state of a low-pressure weather system, or talk about the finer points of the difference between the theatrical release version and the director's cut of a recent movie, or compare batting averages across decades, etc — it's not small talk any more, it's geeking out :)
Robin Dunbar argues that human speech did not evolve due to the need to coordinate hunts better or transport complex abstract ideas but as a more efficient way to build bonds than grooming.
From that perspective lots of communication make (more) sense. The signal always carries emotions in a way. Bandwidth is limited and parts are reserved. Some can control more of it for logic and argument. Speech seems to be trust and relationship building.
Indeed human speech by pure bits is incredibly lousy. But you know why it's so hard to do STT and even TTS? Emotions, accents, interrogatives etc. You don't capture just counting information theoretic bits in words.
I mean Ryan gosling face has 0 bits of information in blade runner and yet we know he's pretty sad and emo.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
That's a nice anecdote. The other (sort of parallel) utility it has, is smoothly steering the conversation towards deeper topics that you both find interesting to talk about, in the exploratory sense, finding common grounds etc. You just poke around, until some interesting coincidence pops up. But this is more for conversations that do not have a clearly known point or objective beforehand.
The metaphor I use is we have lot of distinct ideas or topics. Consider them as gold nuggets. Then through these glue sentences we flatten these gold nuggets creating a big foil or fabric which are laid on top of each other and they intermingle. This allows us to remember the same main ideas across multiple scenarios. That's how our brain works most of the time. The stronger match is Hopfield-style associative memory
> the purpose of people getting together for a conversation over a beer or coffee or lunch or dinner is that it the food and drink spare us from the burden of needing to have something to say throughout the whole conversation.
This is why I much preferred drinks vs dinner on a first date.
At a dinner it's lose/lose. e.g. if it's going great you have to keep pausing to actually chew and eat your food. If it's going terrible there are lots of awkward moments where you are both chewing silently. I guess if you take turns talking/chewing that works well but seems tough to pull off in practice.
Over drinks there can be more back and forth banter, you can sit next to each other vs across the table so more opportunity for casual physical contact, you can talk to other people, joke around with the bar tender etc.
Plus, a bad drinks can just kind of end after one drink. A bad dinner is harder to get out of.
That being said, I did have one male friend who was dating in his 50s who realized that the woman he was on a date with wanted kids and he already kids. He communicated he didn't want to have more kids. She paused, thought for a moment and then said: "All right. Then we'll just end the dinner here. I've already paid. Good bye." and she got up and left.
I don't think it's that people online need to have more unstructured discussion, or "not get to the point" -- it's that there's no real sense of community in a lot of online spaces. Why would I spend a bunch of time idly having Seinfeldian conversations with strangers with whom I have no rapport or continuity? The vast majority of people who will read my social media comments will be completely invisible to me. All the years of commenting and interacting online have predictably resulted in precisely zero lasting relationships.
If the point of not getting to the point is to build trust, then there has to be a relationship in which that trust is invested. Otherwise, not getting to the point is just more invitation for someone to take issue or dismiss what you're saying, to divert the discussion, or to completely miss the actual points you want to discuss.
The trick though is to gravitate towards places where there is a community and where you end up talking to a few of the same people. HN's probably not going to be it, an IRC channel, Discord, forum, etc, where you keep talking to the same dozen regulars is much better.
I had so many good times doing this when I was younger, on IRC and Forums back in the late 90s, early 00s. I haven't had much luck since then though unfortunately.
Any advice for finding the smaller communities? I've been trying to join larger more public communities to make the initial connections with people but mostly I find that they are either ghost towns with thousands of people but no one is active, or they are so active it's just noise that no one is really keeping up with
So is archive.org. They take down articles when journalists ask them too and block legal sites from being archived. It is more likely for archive.org to take down or make inaccessible a piece of content than archive.is.
> They take down articles when journalists ask them too
They take them down when their respective author / copyright holder wants them down. That wouldn't apply in this case where the author wants them up, but a DNS infrastructure might cause the links to fail.
I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it. Some people want an immutable copy of a page that they can reference in case it gets changed or taken down in the future.
>Not sure what this refers to.
For example you can't even see 4chan's homepage. For such a notable site in internet history, it is a shame that it is not publicly archived by them.
> I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it. Some people want an immutable copy of a page that they can reference in case it gets changed or taken down in the future.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Sure, archive.org may not meet your perfect definition of an archive, but it does see itself as an archive that's preserving things for the future. My understanding is archive.is explicitly rejects that role (e.g. IIRC, they make silent changes to pages, their ownership is opaque, and they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow).
> Yes, the word “archive” in the title is misleading. The main purpose is to hold up ephemeral web pages for latecomers. Shots taken more than a few days ago have almost no visits.
> Going to post it here in case someone several years from now comes to this thread and wants to read the original blog post.
I wouldn't count on short-links living long. Generally, the point of link-shortening is that they're temporary. "zi6qn" might later get reused for some other page.
I hope whoever is running na.me (the domain registration was renewed a month ago) is preparing to register domains like joe.random.na.me if you can demonstrate a registration of joe.random.name, for an affordable amount.
Looks like someone just learned of "ice breaking" for the first time.
All those "ice breaking" exercises you do at work? It's started by like people like the author. They don't have a clue exactly how it should come about. (at least the author understands the concept but still dangerous to implement it at offices as they don't really dig it yet. but it's been 11 years for him so should be better by now)
The author comes as one of those awkward people who gets to the points without any "softening". You seens those people. The author is exactly that kinda person. Annoying but at least don't waste your time. But not great as a close friend but OK as an acquitence.
> There are many, many more people who are clueless about how to behave in online conversations than there are people who are clueless about how to behave in offline ones. How I came to be the flipside of that, I don’t know.
I tried to use "logical" sense here for comments as but acts like the author because I am semi-anonymous here. IRL, I am as cordial and courteous as possible. and try not to shove "logic" into someon's face.
Anyways, glad to see someone understanding the point of ice-breaking late in life (better late than never, thus kudos).
> Someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable.
We kinda-in-the-spectrum fathers of young girls are something else. Finding out at your 40s-ish that sometimes people wants to talk to "just talk" is kind of embarrassing.
The problem is the assumption that I'm obliged to endure such long pointless conversation. I'll need a very strong reason (e.g. you're literally my daughter), or I'd just leave.
> And this, too, was a bit of a revelation to me, that someone would not want to get straight to the point, that someone would need a nice long conversational warmup before they’d feel comfortable enough to be ready to talk about something more uncomfortable. I’m very much a get-to-the-point kind of person. I tend to say what I mean, or nothing at all.
I've worked for a boss like this once - he was the worst boss I ever worked for. There was absolutely no room for nuance in the conversations, no attempt to build rapport or a sense of shared understanding. It was his way or the highway.
Human beings are emotional, not rational actors. The "idle chit-chat" gets the foundations of emotional solidarity in place that make anything else possible. When you try to avoid it, you get an organization slinging daggers at each other because someone had the nerve - the audacity - to tell people what to do over an email without any room for them to respond and feel heard, never mind that, rationally, that's exactly what they were hired to do.
There is, of course, value in getting to the point - but only after you consistently build and assure and rebuild and reassure confidence that everyone is in the same boat together.
Thanks to whoever posted this 11yo gem. I've never read it. Its humbling and encouraging to see someone willing to post his fumblings even in his 50's. I feel like he'd been lambasted or mocked had he posted this today on substack or twitter.
As a younger man I was more of the "Just say what you mean, get straight to the point" kind of guy. I think what changed for me is that I learned that people are often much more interesting than their opinions. Going to someone wanting one-word answers to everything (outside of a work context) can become very impersonal and extractive. Its reductionist. It's assuming you're the only one with deep thoughts, conflicted feelings on certain topics, and interesting opinions.
On the other hand, another value of not getting to the point immediately is in order to build suspense. Like the author, it took me a while to realise how important suspense and build-up is in order to communicate memorably and persuasively.
I spent a large portion of my early twenties learning (through doing) about how important it is to "get to the point" by "keeping it simple", but it took me a great deal longer to understand how much more valuable it is to actually make a point by taking the listener on a bit of a mental journey first.
69 comments
When you speak with someone, you likely are not aware of everything that is going on with their current emotional state. If they're having a good day or bad, if they even have had the time to build insight on it, what's nagging at them, etc. You may also not know where their ideologies, ethics, morality, etc are since these are only really shared with the ones close to them. And even then these shift and ebb especially if someone is at a formative time of their life (eg a college student).
So every initial conversation is a little back-and-forth of mapping this out, warming up, and saving the deeper stuff for later. It's a trust-building exercise where you suss out if someone will be receptive, if they'll validate your experience of the world or if they're more likely to be closed off and dismissive. Because the latter hurts and that hurt can last longer than you expect.
I personally don't find small talk rejuvenating and used to get bored of it quickly. I think the thing that irked me was that I always saw myself as open-minded and receptive and it felt like a waste of time, just get to the point, etc. But these days I'm keenly aware that we're not all at the same place internally and someone may have had some less-than-ideal experiences they're still holding onto. I can be sympathetic to that even if it means I'm bored for a few minutes of my day - it's really the least that I can do.
And more concretely, you're determining someone's values before offending them. Through small talk you might discover they're more conservative. Maybe they're hippies at heart. Maybe they hate dark humor, maybe they love it.
If you know those things, you can choose which serious conversations you'd like to have and which you'd better avoid. Plus the process of sniffing each other out means there's more baseline trust going in.
You might want to revise that as "no unpleasant surprises and minimal surprises in general".
People will always surprise you, but we prefer pleasant surprises.
If somebody gets into discussing the current state of a low-pressure weather system, or talk about the finer points of the difference between the theatrical release version and the director's cut of a recent movie, or compare batting averages across decades, etc — it's not small talk any more, it's geeking out :)
From that perspective lots of communication make (more) sense. The signal always carries emotions in a way. Bandwidth is limited and parts are reserved. Some can control more of it for logic and argument. Speech seems to be trust and relationship building.
edit: Typo
I mean Ryan gosling face has 0 bits of information in blade runner and yet we know he's pretty sad and emo.
-- David Foster Wallace
This is why I much preferred drinks vs dinner on a first date.
At a dinner it's lose/lose. e.g. if it's going great you have to keep pausing to actually chew and eat your food. If it's going terrible there are lots of awkward moments where you are both chewing silently. I guess if you take turns talking/chewing that works well but seems tough to pull off in practice.
Over drinks there can be more back and forth banter, you can sit next to each other vs across the table so more opportunity for casual physical contact, you can talk to other people, joke around with the bar tender etc.
Plus, a bad drinks can just kind of end after one drink. A bad dinner is harder to get out of.
That being said, I did have one male friend who was dating in his 50s who realized that the woman he was on a date with wanted kids and he already kids. He communicated he didn't want to have more kids. She paused, thought for a moment and then said: "All right. Then we'll just end the dinner here. I've already paid. Good bye." and she got up and left.
If the point of not getting to the point is to build trust, then there has to be a relationship in which that trust is invested. Otherwise, not getting to the point is just more invitation for someone to take issue or dismiss what you're saying, to divert the discussion, or to completely miss the actual points you want to discuss.
The trick though is to gravitate towards places where there is a community and where you end up talking to a few of the same people. HN's probably not going to be it, an IRC channel, Discord, forum, etc, where you keep talking to the same dozen regulars is much better.
Any advice for finding the smaller communities? I've been trying to join larger more public communities to make the initial connections with people but mostly I find that they are either ghost towns with thousands of people but no one is active, or they are so active it's just noise that no one is really keeping up with
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.name#Discontinuation_of_third...
https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49550772
Here is an archive link of the original blog post:
https://archive.is/zi6qn
Going to post it here in case someone several years from now comes to this thread and wants to read the original blog post.
IIRC, archive.is actually explicitly rejects the idea that they're an actual archive for the preservation of material.
They take them down when their respective author / copyright holder wants them down. That wouldn't apply in this case where the author wants them up, but a DNS infrastructure might cause the links to fail.
> and block legal sites from being archived.
Not sure what this refers to.
I was contesting the claim that archive.org wants to preserve material. It's hard to trust that an archive will preserve the page you archived if the owner can come along at any time and wipe it. Some people want an immutable copy of a page that they can reference in case it gets changed or taken down in the future.
>Not sure what this refers to.
For example you can't even see 4chan's homepage. For such a notable site in internet history, it is a shame that it is not publicly archived by them.
You're letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Sure, archive.org may not meet your perfect definition of an archive, but it does see itself as an archive that's preserving things for the future. My understanding is archive.is explicitly rejects that role (e.g. IIRC, they make silent changes to pages, their ownership is opaque, and they reserve the right to just disappear without a trace tomorrow).
This is how archive.is describes itself: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/1i277vt/psa_ar...:
> Yes, the word “archive” in the title is misleading. The main purpose is to hold up ephemeral web pages for latecomers. Shots taken more than a few days ago have almost no visits.
> Going to post it here in case someone several years from now comes to this thread and wants to read the original blog post.
I wouldn't count on short-links living long. Generally, the point of link-shortening is that they're temporary. "zi6qn" might later get reused for some other page.
All those "ice breaking" exercises you do at work? It's started by like people like the author. They don't have a clue exactly how it should come about. (at least the author understands the concept but still dangerous to implement it at offices as they don't really dig it yet. but it's been 11 years for him so should be better by now)
The author comes as one of those awkward people who gets to the points without any "softening". You seens those people. The author is exactly that kinda person. Annoying but at least don't waste your time. But not great as a close friend but OK as an acquitence.
> There are many, many more people who are clueless about how to behave in online conversations than there are people who are clueless about how to behave in offline ones. How I came to be the flipside of that, I don’t know.
I tried to use "logical" sense here for comments as but acts like the author because I am semi-anonymous here. IRL, I am as cordial and courteous as possible. and try not to shove "logic" into someon's face.
Anyways, glad to see someone understanding the point of ice-breaking late in life (better late than never, thus kudos).
We kinda-in-the-spectrum fathers of young girls are something else. Finding out at your 40s-ish that sometimes people wants to talk to "just talk" is kind of embarrassing.
The problem is the assumption that I'm obliged to endure such long pointless conversation. I'll need a very strong reason (e.g. you're literally my daughter), or I'd just leave.
I've worked for a boss like this once - he was the worst boss I ever worked for. There was absolutely no room for nuance in the conversations, no attempt to build rapport or a sense of shared understanding. It was his way or the highway.
Human beings are emotional, not rational actors. The "idle chit-chat" gets the foundations of emotional solidarity in place that make anything else possible. When you try to avoid it, you get an organization slinging daggers at each other because someone had the nerve - the audacity - to tell people what to do over an email without any room for them to respond and feel heard, never mind that, rationally, that's exactly what they were hired to do.
There is, of course, value in getting to the point - but only after you consistently build and assure and rebuild and reassure confidence that everyone is in the same boat together.
As a younger man I was more of the "Just say what you mean, get straight to the point" kind of guy. I think what changed for me is that I learned that people are often much more interesting than their opinions. Going to someone wanting one-word answers to everything (outside of a work context) can become very impersonal and extractive. Its reductionist. It's assuming you're the only one with deep thoughts, conflicted feelings on certain topics, and interesting opinions.
I spent a large portion of my early twenties learning (through doing) about how important it is to "get to the point" by "keeping it simple", but it took me a great deal longer to understand how much more valuable it is to actually make a point by taking the listener on a bit of a mental journey first.