I doubt most people know how to start conversations on online messaging services.

Almost every call on Skype in the past began with “Hello, can you hear me?”

That one-liner intro just doesn’t make sense.

Why would we start by asking if the other person can hear us?

We don’t do that when calling someone on the phone because we know they can. 

And if they don’t, they’ll immediately tell us. 

Skype and the internet’s patchy record in the 2000s made people always ask the same one-liner even when things got much better later on.

But it’s not just Skype. 

A colleague who chats with me daily once began a new message thread on Slack with “Hi, can I ask you a quick doubt?” and waited for me to respond before asking a regular question.

If you are communicating on a messenger, you don’t need to always wait for the other person to respond before you ask.

Unless it’s sensitive, you can just leave your message there and the other person will respond when he/she sees it.

We communicate online as if we do in person and sometimes we don’t need to.