Video chat etiquette with strangers

Open like a person, not like an interviewer

The default opening is a question about where somebody is from, and it is the weakest one available. It is the conversational equivalent of a form field — it produces an answer rather than an exchange, and then you need another question, and now you are conducting an interview.

Say something instead. React to something, comment on something, admit you have no idea how to open a conversation like this. Almost anything with a bit of self in it outperforms a question, because it gives the other person something to respond to rather than something to complete.

And keep the first thirty seconds low-stakes. Nobody decides anything important in them — but people do decide whether this feels like it is going to be work.

You are a poor judge of how it went

The single most useful thing to know about these conversations is that your read on them is unreliable, and unreliable in a predictable direction. People consistently underestimate how much a new conversation partner liked them — researchers call it the liking gap, and it has its own section over on the page about meeting a lot of people quickly, because it is the single biggest reason people abandon conversations that were going fine.

The mechanism is simple enough: you have access to your own critical inner commentary and none at all to theirs. You know every clumsy sentence you produced. You cannot see that they were not tracking any of it, because they were busy running the same audit on themselves.

The practical upshot for etiquette is that "I should probably let them go, they seem bored" is a thought worth distrusting.

The reluctance to start is also miscalibrated

Something similar holds for beginning conversations at all. Commuters asked to talk to a stranger expected it to be unpleasant, and instead reported a more positive experience — and learned more — than those who kept to themselves2. The anticipation was wrong; the experience was fine.

Which is a reasonable frame for a bad session. If three matches in a row went nowhere and you are ready to conclude you are bad at this, the more likely reading is that you got three people who were not up for it, and that your prediction about the fourth is being made by the least reliable narrator available.

It is also worth knowing that the value of these conversations does not depend on them becoming anything. Research on everyday social contact has found that interactions with people well outside your close circle — the acquaintances and near-strangers most of us barely count — track meaningfully with day-to-day wellbeing1. A conversation does not have to go anywhere to have been worth having, which is a genuinely freeing thing to believe on a site like this.

Leaving well

The single most useful thing to internalise: ending a conversation is not an insult, and it is not an event. Both people know the format. Both have the same button. Most matches are short, and treating a short one as a rejection is a category error.

If you want to leave gracefully, "nice talking to you" and then going is complete. It costs one second and it lands better than an elaborate exit, which mostly signals that you think leaving requires an excuse.

The corollary matters more: when somebody leaves on you, that is not information about you. It is a judgement made on a few seconds of evidence by someone doing exactly what the format invites.

• Say something rather than asking something.
• Assume it is landing better than it feels — the research is fairly clear.
• Short conversations are the normal outcome, not the failure state.
• Leave simply and without an excuse. Let others do the same.