Member-only story

Stop saying hello!

Bryan Collins
2 min readJan 2, 2025

--

I discovered a fun website the other day, nohello.net, which offers some contrarian netiquette.

Photo by Pablo Gentile on Unsplash

When you’re DM-ing or messaging someone, stop saying hello, hola, heya or Dia Dhuit (that’s Irish for hello).

Excessive politeness is the equivalent of answering a ringing phone, greeting the caller, and putting them on hold.

It’s maddeningly frustrating.

I’m on board with the contrarian piece of netiquette for two reasons.

Reason 1: It rings alarm bells

I get messages from scammers via X, email, my DMs, and comments almost every day.

They use maddingly polite openers like “Hello dear” alongside AI-brushed profile pics of their sun-drenched avatars lounging at the beach.

I engaged with a few of them for kicks. After about twenty minutes, they were making promises about crypto coins with billion-dollar tech and asking for my funds asap.

People I know and trust? They get to the point.

“Beers later?”

or

“Can you pick up the kids at 2?“

Reason 2: It’s throat-clearing
When I was a freelance writer years ago, an editor took one of my articles and slashed out 20% with his red pen.

--

--

Bryan Collins
Bryan Collins

Written by Bryan Collins

Content Strategist | Copywriter | USA Today Best-Selling Author. Read my daily newsletter @ bryancollins.com

Responses (6)