Really? Huh, completely foreign concept to me. I was drawing that idea from what I had assumed was an established notion that social interaction on the internet isn't something that can be well-translated to real-life interaction. The way that I see people speaking to each other on this forum, or the internet as a whole, is usually very different from the way that they speak normally. Mannerisms, quirks, all of these things inevitably disappear once you begin to communicate through text, for the obvious reason that those things become irrelevant. To me, observing these things during social situations is a key way I understand not only people's social habits, but just what's going on inside their heads. You can certainly draw some things from one to the other, but I've always figured the tie wasn't strong enough to gather a significant amount of experience to use it.

Yeah, I mean, it's obviously not going to be for everybody. Works for me. I try to be covert about it, though. The way I compliment people is like... Like, you know how you can accidentally insult someone if you say something like, "oh, I think he's a little younger than you, dad", implying that your dad is an old man. I can reverse that. "Oh, you have a boyfriend? That makes sense" implying that she's attractive, and therefore [i]would[/i] have a boyfriend. I'm never like, "you have a nice ass". That's not appropriate in any situation. And nothing like, "wow, you have nice eyes" even though that's innocuous, it still makes it obvious, like, "I'm only complimenting you to get you to like me". The example I posted above is just a covert way of going about it that leaves a cool impression. In my experience. Some people just don't think very much about these things.

Now when you're speaking about exercising these, for lack of a better term, "tactics," are you speaking specifically about this forum?