What does the phrase 'social skills' mean in 2024?

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OK, I hope you're able to find what you are looking for. The language thing may seem off-base, but I have thought of here and there over the years while reading your posts, so take it for what it's worth, I guess. Or, not. You know, whatever.

This probably isn't helpful and I'm sorry to be going back to context again, but I really think it's dependent upon how you define successful. For me, personally, I would consider alignment with my personal values and ethics in terms of how I want to try to treat others as a minimum requirement for a successful interaction, even if the social consequences may be negative, so I might approach your question more from that standpoint. Whereas, someone whose benchmark for success is something more along the lines of, say, passing in an office environment and practical concerns like maintaining their employment may flesh out your list very differently.

The coda you added to the one post wasn't there when I responded so I wasn't trying to ignore it.

I've had people tell me that my writing is difficult to read, I've had one person here tell me a few times that I'm not explicit enough but in her specific case I was waiting to see if anyone else could independently confirm what she was saying.

My question back would be - do the transformational grammar issues show up in my shorter posts or just in my more exploratory ones? I ask because I also consider that people quite often just don't write about what I write about or ask the questions I would, typically it's because it's content that they haven't verbally processed - meaning some of this is probably me pulling things into language that typically aren't and that by itself would confuse people (although in that case I'd probably just need to be patient with people, share it in relatively safe places like here, and obviously not talk about those things IRL because anything that doesn't socially conform in any manner - you get the gist).

In this case I'm trying to understand the external, particularly of the kind that would tell me that I should be a social pariah for not having constant 'game' or walking out the door, putting a fake-engaging expressive set on and lean into other people with jokes, banter, and play that I either hardly know or shouldn't even get along with and if I'm not doing those things (or only with people I have rapport with already) it means that I'm a bottom-of-the-barrel shut-in with no social skills whose probably unsafe to be around or has zero to offer because clearly anyone who isn't fake 100% of the time is at rock bottom contemplating self-deletion - what other way could it be? That's where I'm asking the question - I think something in our culture and what we think of as 'social skills' vs 'signs of a loser' so powerful that the person in question is equivalent to a crackhead out in public.

When I see that happening I'm seeing a mathematical / statistical social effect (those are really grim and make me debate the meaning of the word 'human' quite often) I don't want to obey those even if they're used as shibboleths for 'are you one of us or not?'. Blind rote-copying all of the beliefs of the world around you and making an incoherent but conforming birds nest just to win popularity or have people think you're okay for not being different (for it's own sake) is really like saying that all life is worthless including our own and that our consciousness and the qualities of its contents are equally worthless.

If I or other people here are really mostly at war with shibboleth understandings kludged together by historical social accidents and getting punished for not rote copying all thoughts from immediate environment - that's where I have to accept that I'm operating from a different functional rung in terms of adult developmental maps, that other people in the same position would run into the same thing, and that this is what it's like to live in a society that's mostly locked in concrete operational mode cognitively. That's part of why this thread though - not to talk about myself but I'd have to imagine other autistics run into the same problems and I wanted to mostly match data with them to see what people agreed, disagreed with etc. and see if I could get a more tested picture of what's going on at this level of socializing. My take has mostly been that it's people screwing with each other over status when it's not these haphazard birds nests of popular belief but I want to see if I can get a bit more precise and do better with my encounters with it.

And what about healthy social interactions?
I've read about how those are good preventions for Dementia, but I don't have any idea what those can be...

Positive sum and openly curious. That's how I'd describe those.