Starting conversations with new friends

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I recently became Facebook friends with a few people on Facebook. Some of them have special interests that overlap with mine. This information is visible on their profiles / timeline. When I messaged them and asked them a question relevant to our special interest, some of them responded with the question "why?" or otherwise indicated that they wanted to know why I was asking. I kind of assumed it would have been obvious why I was asking -- e.g., nobody really asks anyone questions about a topic without being interested in the topic themself, so I assumed it was obvious that I am also interested in the topic and am just curious about /their/ interest in it. But I'm now wondering if it's because I had just "met" them ("met" in the online Facebook sense), and it was too straightforward of a question to ask without preliminary "ice-breaking" interaction.

That’s possible.

Sometimes, you have to “break the ice,” like you said.

I'm afraid the first mistake is to assume that just because a person claims to be passionate about a subject/topic that they will engage with you on facebook. In my experience its very rare for a person to engage in intellectual discussion unless they perceive they are communicating with somebody who is their intellectual equal or who had exceeded their own knowledge.
You will have to make an impression on these pricks first.

Indeed, I know it's possible, that's why I suggested it lol. I'm wondering how likely it is, even considering that they are also autistic and might be used to straightforwardness. I suppose they might also be less trusting / more guarded, and since they don't know me well enough, they are just being cautious.

Uhhh yeah, sure. This is good advice and is based on a reasonable understanding of my original post and does not contain any weird assumptions about the context whatsoever. <-- sarcasm

Just say that you saw that you were interested in a similar thing to what you are interested in.

If they were me I would not have asked and replied with a rather long and detailed reply about my interest! HAHA! (And then I get embarissed that I seem like some sort of expert!)

Yep, that's exactly what I did. It's just that this has happened more than once, so I was just wondering if there is some norm that I might be violating.



And I would have loved such a response! But I wouldn't fault them otherwise.

All I can say----is that people are funny!

Frequently, NT's are weirder than people on the Spectrum. Just because one's an NT doesn't make that one perfect.

Yes. They've had years of practice!

Here is one tiny bit of insight in your reply, but I find your use of the word "pricks" is unwarranted.

Yes, it seems like I would have to make an impression on them, which would count as preliminary ice-breaking. But I've started similar conversations with other new friends before so I didn't really see this as a violation of expected norms. I see this as even a form of small-talk. Like if the person is into gaming, asking them if they are into the Elder Scrolls franchise at all doesn't seem like an invasive question. I would even do this in person if I noticed the other person was wearing a t-shirt that had a gaming logo on it. I more or less expected them to say something like "Yeah I've played such and such" or "I'm a huge fan".

In one case where I asked someone what Linux distribution they use, they simply asked "why". Another time I asked someone if they are into Elder Scrolls at all, and their response was "I played a lot of Skyrim, why?" In the former situation, the "why" might understandably contain an element of suspicion. Given that they don't know me well enough, outright asking what Linux they use might raise a red (or yellow or orange) flag depending on their experience. They might think I was doing some kind of social engineering reconnaissance (more on this below). In the latter case, maybe the "why" didn't contain an element of suspicion, and they just wanted to know why I was asking, maybe with the intention of expressing an openness to more discussion. Like, if someone asked me "Are you into LOTR at all?", my first thought-reaction would be something like "Yeah I like LOTR, why what's up? do you have something LOTR-related to share with me or something?"

I know one of the hallmarks of autism is difficulty in having an intuitive understanding others' perspectives. I think this is one of the reasons I have trouble hitting it off with people who simply don't resonate or click with me. An NT with highly developed social skills doesn't have to have anything in common in order to click with someone; they intuitively know how to make socializing a mutually-satisfying experience. This difficulty seems to also affect my ability to click even with people on the spectrum.

Re social engineering reconnaissance: it's virtually impossible to outright ask people questions related to things they do without it raising such flags, even for seemingly innocuous facts or info. This is a whole other rabbit hole for me to worry about in interacting with others--I feel like I could easily fall into obsessing over whether things I say come across as social engineering reconnaissance attempts, and so I immediately regret saying something or I don't say anything at all. I've realized that preliminary ice-breaking is something that you have to gradually chip away at, not just go at it full-throttle with a jack hammer.

Got it, I am projecting my own experiences and the response from the people you communicated with probably didn't warrant my assuming they were "pricks".

In my experience NT people with passions/interests are competitive and will feign arrogance in the way they carry themselves (like they are important). So in order to engage you need to "click". For example Star wars "uber" fans might not be impressed by demonstrating deep knowledge of Luke Sywalker or the force because fanatic fans are commonplace, However many of these uber fans have a grudge against Disney and/or Katherine Kennedy so one way to engage is to say something like "Disney ruined Star wars" which will connect emotionally to the superfan and "bang" you are in.

Ah I see what you're saying. But I disagree with how that all works. For one, you can't feign being an expert in something you're not actually an expert in, unless the person you are feigning to is really, really dumb. If the scenario you are describing is for someone to feign being a Star Wars "uber" fan in order to "sit with the cool kids", the cool kids are going to need a lot more to go on than just "Disney ruined Star Wars". You'd need a whole background of Star Wars lore and everything that constitutes being an "uber" fan. Otherwise, you're back to the "loser" table.

How this is supposed to be related to my issue in the OP, I'm not sure. I guess you assumed I was trying to "sit with the cool kids" based on your own projection? No, I just made a couple of new friends on Facebook who, as far as I can tell, are not too far out of my league intellectually, even if their experiences and level of knowledge about the special interests are different than mine. E.g., the Linux friend I mentioned earlier was a kernel developer, so he's obviously got way more development experience than I do, but we can still have a conversation about Linux and FOSS-related things and know what each other are talking about.

My point is it's the same thing. Even "average NT people" with a special interests will only make friends with you if there is an emotional connection. This goes beyond just asking them questions.

I'll give you an example. In my university days there was student who had a special interest in history and I tried to share stories with him which I thought he would be interested. He rejected my advances largely because he did not know me and had enough friends. One day as we walking to class the tutor got the room booking wrong so the students were checking with each other on where to go. Eventually one student said he knew where to go. Other students started following him. The student in question and I were the only ones who didn't move. I turned to him and said "well we better do like Marx and follow the masses like good citizens". The fellow laughed and it broke the ice because I used a historic reference and he got the joke. I broke down an emotional barrier and we were good friends for 3 years (we eventually parted ways over a silly misunderstanding).

Replying “why”: This forms an open-ended question, which is taught as a tool to further stimulate the conversation.

That's my (new) impression as well.

By the way I like your signature "paralysis by over-analysis" I think I may have done some of that with this thread.

My second response to this: There are some fields/interests where you don't have to be a certified expert or have a degree to be considered "conversant", but your ideas won't be taken as seriously as someone who is, and the extent that you can engage with experts is obviously limited by your own lack of experience, so your intention should be mostly to learn from them and engage heterodidactically <-- asking questions, bouncing ideas off, seeing if you're on the same page. This is how I am when interacting with software people and academics.

Now that I think of it, somehow I have this weird feeling that something that happened to me recently on Twitter is related this. I think I might have been a target of gatekeeping. Certain sub-Twitters might want to keep discussion at a high quality, so my interacting with them might have just been getting in the way. I didn't initially think my interaction had that much of an effect on the sub-Twitter given that the "coolest kids" there have thousands of followers and receive hundreds of comments. I figured I would hardly be noticed, if at all, or else just ignored. Of course, this would only make sense if one of the suspicions I had were true--I tend to be very skeptical of suspicions where I think something is referring to me.