The author is saying something different here - that in this mode, the speaker’s feelings about how the recipient will receive a blunt message are the speaker’s problem.
In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.
Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly.
“I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?”
This isn’t a problem of overpoliteness. It’s a problem of almost nonsensical rambling. I’ve never worked with anyone who actually communicated like this and if they did, they would get pretty direct feedback that they need to stop this. This isn’t polite, it’s dithering. Professor Quirrell level lack of confidence.
> Eh, I think the author is also exaggerating the problem significantly.
> “I hope this is okay to bring up and sorry for the long message, I just wanted to flag that I've been looking at the latency numbers and I'm not totally sure but it seems like there might be an issue with the caching layer?”
You're cherry-picking the most extreme example out of the bunch as a way of discrediting the argument. If you actual read the other examples given:
> The Slack message that starts with "Hey! Hope you had a great weekend :)"before asking a technical question or the PR comment that opens with "I'm not sure if I'm missing something here and sorry if this is a dumb question but" before raising a completely valid concern, or that incident text that spends two full paragraphs explaining that the author was sleep-deprived and had a lot on their plate and the monitoring tool had a weird quirk that they didn't know about and their lead had told them something ambiguous three weeks ago, before finally getting around to saying what actually broke and why.
There's no exaggeration going on here. This is the norm for the majority of Slack conversations I've seen online, including my own job - out of the hundreds of people I've interacted with at my job, well over half of them do this.
It absolutely does have relevance to Crocker's Rules. People exchange pleasantries because there's a cultural tendency to treat a direct, to-the-point message/request out of nowhere without the phatic rituals as off-putting and mildly offensive/insensitive.
This is pretty universally understood in most software engineering cultures in the West, which the author (and certainly the vast majority of HN) appear to reside in. It seems like you probably just don't exist in the same culture - but there's nothing wrong with that, you just have to be aware that that's how we do it.
Crocker's rules are about not burying honesty beneath politeness.
Someone can maybe squint real hard and see the word "Hey", in "Hey, the site is down" as politeness obstructing communication. But at that point, I hope the person seeing it this way operates under Crocker's Rules, because I would say they are a moron. There is a world of difference between basic human pleasantries and niceness that actually obscures communication.
Crocker's rules also explicitly state that others are allowed to disregard niceness, not that they are obligated to. Indeed, if you are offended or bothered by someone being polite, then under Crocker's rules, that would be your problem.
In this case the recipient has already reassured the speaker they can handle their own feelings, but still meets resistance from speakers who are guilty or worried about how they will come across if they are too direct.