MU Peeves Thread
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@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:
At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication, which is hard enough in person when there’s also body language and facial expressions and tone to pick up on. Text has none of those things. Don’t drop hints, cross your fingers, touch your toes, and hope the other person clues in to what you’re (not) saying. Say what you mean. You can be nice about it! But say what you mean. The internet is not going to burn to the ground if you tell someone “Oh! Thanks for the offer, but I’m not really up for that.” or even just “No, thank you.” the way we were all taught when we were, like, five.
Yes! Exactly!
You dropping what would be a very clear hint to anyone else that you aren’t enjoying our interactions:
Me who is terrible at social interactions:
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I do kinda’ feel like… as a hobby, we need a masterclass on how to take a hint through text.
For me, I look for enthusiasm and actual action. I give someone time to reach out to me. All it takes is a few instances of someone reaching out for me to understand that this person does indeed want to hang.
If I reach out and get a response, but it’s very lukewarm and they don’t actually follow up, or offer very little assistance in the way of actually planning a scene, I take the hint. Saves us both the trouble. I’ll ask twice, generally, and see if there’s any connection there, but no more.
If NO ONE engages with me after I put in some moderate effort to be fun and friendly on channels and offer to run scenes or Do A Thing, then I tend to write off the crowd as not a good fit for me and move on.
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@Yam I mean, earlier in the intro to mu*ing thread it was mentioned about nuerodiverse our community is. We’d be just as well served by a masterclass on how to communicate a clear boundary instead of relying on hints and easily misinterpreted social cues. But I know that would give plenty of people panic attacks, too. This stuff is all just part of the beautiful mess.
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We do actually have data on how people say that want to be directly told things but then no one actually wants to do that apparently.
I have no idea what to make of it.
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@Yam That’s not unsurprising. The majority of people are understanding and considerate, so they want people to be direct and honest with them. However a minority of people are not understanding or considerate, and the understanding and considerate people don’t want to roll the dice on whether the person they are being direct and honest with is the former rather than the latter.
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@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:
At that point it’s not harassment, it’s just the other person being annoying by not taking the hint. And my dudes, dropping a hint is not clear communication. It’s deliberately vague communication,
Yep. My own experience with that was finding out that someone felt harassed by my asking for RP and chatting. Thinking, “Yeah, they never actually want to play and they never seem enthusiastic, but they always say they’re stressed/sick RL, and they always say ‘another time’ and they engage with the chat.” Everything about the interaction but the ‘hint’ in their tone said I should continue to reach out, and I thought that ‘hint’ was just them not feeling chipper because illness.
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I mean I’ll ask someone to RP. Then when they don’t or it doesn’t work out; I get all rejection sensitive and never ask again. I just wait for others to ask me.
Spoiler: It doesn’t work well. Also, as much as I thought I was being annoying, I’ve been told I wasn’t annoying. So I just try to ask, but I only do it like twice and then I stop. They now have to engage if they want to.
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@RightMeow This is what killed my excitement for the last game I tried out.
I usually join games by my lonesome, so I reached out to anyone that had hooks that were relevant to my PC or just looked interesting. I got a lot of vague ‘sure in the future’ replies but nothing beyond that. After a couple months of this, I just logged off and never returned.
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@catzilla Just teleport into their living rooms while they’re having dinner. That always works.
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If someone says “we should RP sometime” and you actually do want to RP with them, a good response is “sounds great, what day next week works for you?”
If you just answer “we should rp sometime” with “yeah, we should!” then everyone’s going to explode into a pile of brainweasels and never get the scene going. Somebody has to ask, somebody has to pick a time, effort.
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@Ashkuri And as a corollary, we shouldn’t say “we should RP sometime” as a polite, social, nothing statement like we do when we say “we really should get coffee” to the irritating person you used to work with, and you still see down at the grocery store. Mean what we say and say what we mean.
