Unstructured messages in a serious place is annoying, yes, but in a water cooler area it can set a more relaxed tone. It's a cultural thing and I'd never force someone to endure my style of communication in a place where it's not welcome.
I'm one of those who tend not to embellish my written messages with all sorts of euphemisms and fluff. So maybe my coworkers find my written communication a bit dry.
First, I don't have very good verbal skills and second, I find certain contorted forms of language to communicate simple things disingenuous. So I'd rather say "please do X" instead of "oh there is no rush, I wanted to just give you a friendly nudge to blah blah and then circle back blah blah". It all sounds passive aggressive in the latter form IMO.
That said, you want to meet the people you talk to over a video call or even better in person in order to establish a good understanding and trust. Overall written format has a much lower bandwidth than the verbal communication. gifs and emojis do help a little communicate the tone though.
The point of the communication is not to contain actual significant content; it's to declare a fait accompli. Lots of text is like this. Being fresh and exotic isn't the goal.
Some people really appreciate the blunt communications style. Some people don't. I personally believe one should be able to appreciate all communications styles, because it provides you access to more information. Ignoring something smart because one got bad feelings from how it was said strikes me as rather puerile.
We already do that during normal communication - people rarely say what they mean in the simplest way possible. We couch the message in all kinds of extraneous details. The tediousness of which is part of why some people want to use LLMs to generate messages for them in the first place.
Stripping that out might ironically reduce the need: Of people come to expect their messages to be automatically stripped of fluff, why include it in the first place?
You've put into text format, something which most extroverts already intuitively understand.
Communicating with more than one person at a time requires dumbed down slogans and short bits of summarized information. Nuanced long form communication is a luxury that can rarely be afforded.
Of course, the sentiment in this reply could probably have been expressed with far less text and/or syntax (probably in less than a tweet even).
IMO people prefer to communicate with some nuance and some degree of redundant expression. Terseness is itself even a kind of nuance when you're allowed to not use it.
Drives for widespread purity in language never seem to pan out, in either human<->human communication or human<->computer communication. I suspect there are reasons for this that might be somewhat under-researched.
My point is that tons of people in this thread seem to think this style of communication is really great because it's emphatic and gets the point across clearly or something.
I'm trying to highlight that maybe it's not so great if you're on the receiving end of it.
I'm sure a bunch of hypocrites will flag me down, though.
I think it's less about formalism than it is about clear communication.
People will also be confused if you shout out a message to the room without appropriate pauses (commas or periods) or without the right tone (question marks).
"we set up some radios at various villages, and now we're going to write an article in coded language and buzzwords because what we actually have to say is about a sentence long and doesn't sound deep and meaningful when you say:
doing things with other people slowly lets things get complicated and we don't think this is a bad thing, as it allows some failure occasionally."
I am clearly not the target audience of this article, though, as I find the coded language to get in the way of communication, rather than facilitate it. There might be people who feel a certain way reading those words to whom this might be aimed.
> subconsciously encourages the user that they understand the message
One of the problems with these friendlier messaging is, they are friendlier because they are more often only relevant to en_US(2023) linguistic, visual and societal context, and they are often in fact out of context by the time they are dissected into language resources, passed to (human or machine) translators, and executed on user terminals.
[Dismiss] is blunt, cold, harsh, "disrespectful", unnegotiable, but it virtually has no invalid translation candidates. [Got it], [Go ahead], [Fine], those can be anything.
The gem of this article is: "Messages that are difficult to process are less compelling."
The best thing we can do when communicating is make it easy -- in both message and medium (with apologies to McLuhan) -- for the folks we want to consume it to consume it.
reply