-MSN messenger - social issue

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Ok like every ordinary night after work I come back to home I watch TV or play some videogames or draw something on lightwave or just eating stuff ....whatver but in all cases I login into the msn messenger and chat with friends and people while doing one of these things....and usually there s more of 15 persons online on my list .

There s some friends in real life and some users from forums that I used to chat a lot with them at this time ....as a person with HFA I feel that the IM messengers are the only link between me and the external world.

but what I noticed lately ....that I am always the one (or 99% of case to be fair) who make the first move in a chat conversation ....i am always the first one who type "hi" and the flow of the chat goes on.....but I never get a "hi" when I login even from close friends and colleagues (except 1 wp user and 1 NT user of wp irc....but they r rarely online at this time)

So I made like kind of test in the last week.... I login and I don't say hi to anyone .....and I made sure to fix my status as "online" and I went to play some game or watch some TV or just doing something else on my PC ......Hours and hours passed and no orange highlight appeared on my screen (note that there were always between 14 to 25 online contacts) sometime I finish watching a movie or finish something on pc that i working on ...and still not a single message from anyone .....sometimes I get "Hi,how r u" from family members on my other account but these r not counted ( sometimes i login in windows msn and msn live).... but i am just counting on contact list of the account where i add friends/people never a hi from one of these .

I tried to think logically about the reasons of this but the only explication I could think of is no one really likes me for some reason ,nor a "friend" ,nor a colleague,nor a coworker,nor a guy ,nor a girl ,nor most of users from forums or online games , damn even the four close friends I knew since childrood initiate a chat convo with a hi once per year but in 99% I start it . I don't know what s wrong ....I might be boring or stupid or nerd but whatever the reason the conclusion is the same and I feel disappointed by myself .

I know this sounds silly to most of you but for me it s important and it's a big disappointment more than you can imagine, I start wondering if I have to continue using the msn messeger or just let it go and go on with my life doing other more useful things or just using WP irc channel chat instead.....

Last edited by LePetitPrince on 25 Oct 2006, 4:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I sign on to a messenger service each night and I rarely say hi to anyone first. I just have it open incase some one needs to talk to me about something. If they want to continue the conversation they start, great. If not, I return to what it was I was doing. I rely on others to come up with topics to talk about, and if I ask a question (meaing I'm interested in what they have to say) I expect more than a one word answer. Hopefully sometimes I will get questions in return to keep the conversation going.

Were you just tired of saying hi first or were you really wanting to test them to see if they really are your friends? Please, help me understand. It doesn't sound silly.

yea you can say it s test to see if I mean something to some people ....you see when you say initiate a chat with someone that s mean that you are interested in him (as friend , as something else or just need him for something whatever...) even the ones who suppose to be my closest friends failed me(i didn't see them from long time btw because of different universities but i was used to hang with them every summer) at first I thought it s just coincidence so I kept doing this for days and i didn't get any message , no one wanted to start a conversation with me....it s like I am invisible on their list.

This used to happen to me. But there is one thing that changed it:

I started having close-knit ties with people in live chatrooms. For some reason, getting to know someone in a chatroom is more potent than just a forum. These chatrooms were also dedicated to Medieval Roleplaying... so if someone liked the way I played my character, then that person was most likely to message me first.

Ever considered a RPG that isn't in a videogame?

The way I see it, aspies are not very good a entertaining others. When someone enters a conversation, he expects to be entertained or to learn something interesting to him. I think we usually fail to provide this two things and people see the conversations with us as boring or pointless. It takes a lot of experience to notice the subtle mistakes we make... I'm barely starting to learn...

I disagree

O.K., then you have to change something: yourself, or who your friends are.



Don't do that. I have thought about doing that. But really doing that means that there are so many other things in real life that involve social interaction of a similar sort that I might as well have to let go because AIM, MSN and what-have-you are really just extensions of real-life social interaction (as much as I didn't realize that when I first started using them.)

I can socialise better to NTs on msn than outside the internet.

I talk alot on msn, I sign in every other day mostly.

I've done a similar test, and got similar results: for the most part people did not initiate conversations with me. Only a small percentage of people actually said "Hi!" to me first, and that did show to me how important I was to them. It was even more significant if the conversation that ensued after the "Hi!" was something of interest to ME, as opposed to something that the other person wanted, for example. Friends who only talk to you when they want something from you, and talk only about their interests, are not good friends. Dump those people.



Although people with AS often do much better with online interactions like AIM and MSN, online interactions are not a substitute for real life interactions. I don't intend to say that online interactions are insignificant, as they are significant. Some people think that they can just offend anybody and not give a damn about it, simply because it's online... but there are real people sitting at the computers! However, whether people like it or not, we all pretty much have to interact with real life people just to survive, and letting go face-to-face social interactions just puts us out of much-needed practice with the interactions.

Roleplay.

I can understand where your coming from. because i only ever get good conversation on msn messenger. At school people don't like to approch me for whatever reason, my body language is the big culprit there, and i find situations when im chatting to people uncomfortable, becaus ein 7 years i did not connect with anyone very good, and those i have connected with have gone onto other things now.

But, as has been said above, if people don't want to talk to you, don't bother with them, i normally inititate conversations online as it is, i don't really worry about who chats to me online, i have over 100 contacts, ( not meaning to rant ) yes i don't chat to all of them of course, but it means there is no shortage of people, im not saying get more people on for the sake of it. But find people, perhaps on here who are not afraid to say hello to you. And to simply want the company and a chat. yes, it is no subsitute for real life, but if it gives you a link to outside, take it, or buy an MMORPG like World of Warcraft, and then you can interact with others and do somethng you might both enjoy, if you don't like WoW no worries, it's an example. But find people in the same boat and bail them out. I would definatley say hi to you online and just relax and chat

I almost never initiate conversations on MSN, because I'm not sure if people want to talk to me or not. If I do start a conversation, it will normally be to ask for information or to make plans with people that I know in real life.

Uhg. I thought I was the only one!

I can't stand to chat on-line for this reason! I'm always the one to initiate conversation, then I'm always the one holding the conversation together. And even then, people will get up and walk away from the computer and leave me talking to my self for 2 to 5 minutes and I'm just sitting there waiting for them to respond. Staring at the screen! It's horrible. I hate it. The only way I've found to deal with it is to set my IM application (Trillian) to close windows after 1 minute of being idle. Then I forget they ever existed anyway, haha. For a time I just thought people hated me. But now I imagine them doing other things besides sitting at the computer screen staring at my name on their contact list.

Always the IMer, never the IMee.

P.S. This video is always what I think of when I talk on-line. It took me a while to figure out what was going on, but it's really funny. (and maybe rated like PG-13, FYI) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmDPdCzCfFM

Wow. Its great to know that i'm not only one with this issue. However, unlike some all the people on my list are people I know in real life and i'm friends with. Some are friends that i've not seen in person for a long time so it has been nice to talk to them. But the rest are friends that i go to college with.

However, i think some of the problem is that i don't do anything interesting to talk about. When i'm at school, i do homework most of the time. so i don't have any stories about things that are happening to me.

What I would like to know is how to kept the conversation going so they would be more likely to IM me? Any ideas out there?

80-90% of the time, I make the 1st move on MSN as well.

I totally agree with the original post, LePetitPrince. I've only a small number of MSN contacts. One of them, who I don't talk to that often, will usually start the conversation.

But another (who happens to be my best mate for many years - and who I meet every few weeks in person) only starts to conversation less than 10% of the time. However, most of the time he does respond and once we start chatting we can go on for
hours. It's very weird. I suppose I have a tendency to say "hi" (after 10/15 mins or so) in case he thinks I'm not talking to him. I guess I don't want to test the friendship.

I feel starting a conversation is a bit of a risk, like it's your feelings that will be hurt if the other person decides not to reply. I do resent a bit that it's always me taking the risk, and it is disappointing when you feel you're the one always initiating the chat. Though there could be any number of reasons for this (and part of the reason I dislike MSN), the other person may be away or busy doing something else. When you start a conversation in MSN, you can't be sure how the other person is feeling. I agree with Kineticosm that if people stop talking, there's usually a logical reason for this - they're off doing something or talking to someone else. I've learned that people don't always say when they're wandering away from the keyboard.

If initiating a chat works most of the time, I am prepared to do it. If I wasn't getting a reply to my "hello", I'd be a lot less likely to risk it. But I'd rather talk to my friends face to face, than on MSN.

Sometimes people type in a comment beside their name. My friend does this sometimes. May be worth trying, if appropriate, to type something a bit ambiguous or topical in here that might get people to question you as a talking point.