Customer support people are weird.
They ping "Hi" and just leave it at that!

Wtf do you want me to do with your "Hi".

Is it something urgent I need to look at? Or some generic query?

But I won't fucking know that, unless I reply to your stupid context-less greeting. Because you can't bother to take an extra minute to type. Even worse when it is outside my work hours.

If I do decide to reply I am already online and lost my leverage on deciding whether it's actually urgent or not!

Fuck you Karen from support and fuck you Kumar.

And fuck you junior devs! Don't fucking "Hi. There?" me bitch! Type what you want I'll reply if it's worth it and when I have time to.

I think it might be a cultural thing among workers from India. I have always gotten a smalltalk greeting from them before anything of substance, even when I start the IM conversation with a direct business question.

I blew my stack though when I used to work oncall, and someone would see me online, send me an IM, "good evening," then say nothing, and then page out the secondary oncall after I didn't return the smalltalk greeting.

I used to be like that. Then I learned that, in many cultures anyway, responding to a 'Hi' is just part of common communication etiquette, and if you tell them something like, 'Hi Kumar! I'm busy atm, is it urgent or can it wait,' they will probably get the hint, and leave you alone unless it needs immediate attention. Program yourself a shortcut/macro for it if you can't be bothered to type it out all the time.

And if you're really REALLY swamped, don't answer at all.

Hi

I feel you. I can't stand the handshake protocol. I get this all the time from our pile of IBMers.

"Hi how are you?"

Which begins the dance. I just so want to just short circuit the interaction and reply back with

"Ack. Continue"

What you experience is a pre-connection filter avoidance protocol wich some people use to avoid getting blocked or greylisted on connect.
Most humans accept all connection requests wich do not contain enough data for calculating SPAM and QoS-prioritazion scores. So instead of sending their actual message for establishing a connection, some users just send something generic like "Hi". After they got the connection established, they then send the actual message.
The simplest mitigation is to not accept connections containing a generic message.
Another one is to delay SPAM and QoS-prioritization score calculation until the actual message has been received and then close the session with a refusal or sheduling message.
You can also switch between mitigations based on system load or connecting user.