alt Hacker NewsOne aspect of that which is interesting is that what the article calls "Guess culture" is fundamentally exclusionary. If you aren't initiated into how the signalling system works by an insider or in a position of sufficient stability to fail socially many times there isn't a good way to break in. That gives the culture a lot of interesting properties that promote its ability to identify and coordinate against out-groups (which to the people involved would manifest as a "these barbarians just don't know how to be polite and we can't work with them"). One of those adaptions that is a bit crazy in the micro (could just ask for what they want, geeze) but makes a lot of sense in the macro.
Replies
And, importantly, there isn't one single "guess culture"; there are a myriad of different micro-cultures with their own local signals and codes for subtly communicating the information that isn't spelled out in speech.
So even if you are a consummate Guesser, and have been one all your life, if you move across the country (or even just across town!) and find yourself in a group with a different set of Guessers, you may be nearly as badly off as if you were an Asker in that subculture.
It's a matter of different protocols, not exclusivity. An asker going into a guesser culture is like a client that doesn't respect congestion backoff; the guesser protocol is meant to ensure fairness for clients.
The way to deal with it is having some kind of handshake that indicates what protocol is being used.