The First Sixty Seconds on Camera

Most video chats are decided in the first sixty seconds, and very little of that has to do with what you say. It has to do with whether the other person can see your face, hear your voice without effort, and read you as somebody who is present rather than somebody who is half-watching something else. All three are settled before you speak.

That is good news, because those are technical problems with technical answers. Charm is hard to acquire in an afternoon. A lamp takes ten seconds to move.

What the other person sees in second one

Before the audio has even settled, they have a frame of you. Four things in that frame do more work than everything else combined.

Where your light is

The single most common self-inflicted problem on any video platform is sitting with a window or a lamp behind you. The camera exposes for the bright thing, which is the window, and you become a silhouette. You can see yourself perfectly on your own screen, because your eyes adjust and the sensor does not.

Put the light source in front of you and slightly above. A window in daytime, a desk lamp bounced off a wall, the screen itself if there is nothing else. Then look at your own preview and ask whether you can see your own eyes. If you cannot, neither can they, and the whole conversation happens without the part of your face that carries the most information.

How high the camera is

A phone resting in your lap or on a desk points up at your chin and the ceiling. It is an unflattering angle, but the bigger cost is that the frame is now mostly ceiling, so your face occupies a small patch of it. Hold the phone at eye level, or prop it against something at eye level. On a laptop, put a book under it.

One practical detail people get wrong: look at the camera lens sometimes, not only at the face on your screen. The difference between the two on a phone is a couple of centimetres and it reads, on the other end, as the difference between being looked at and being looked past.

What is behind you

The camera shows a great deal more of your room than it does of your face, and you stopped noticing your own room years ago. Turn around and look at it as a stranger would.

There is a privacy version of this point and an aesthetic one. The privacy version: a parcel with your name on it, a letter, a company or university logo, a certificate, a distinctive view out of the window. All of those are legible on video and none of them occur to anybody until afterwards. The aesthetic version is simpler. A plain wall is better than a cluttered one, and anything that reads as chaos will be read as chaos.

Your audio, which matters more than your picture

People tolerate a mediocre picture indefinitely. They will not tolerate having to work to hear you, and that is the thing that actually ends chats early. A room with a hard floor and bare walls makes you sound distant. A fan, an air conditioner or a television behind you does not sound loud to you and sounds enormous to them.

Wired earphones with a microphone fix nearly all of it for the cost of plugging them in. Failing that, turn the fan off and move closer.

The first sixty seconds of actually talking

Nobody has ever been skipped for saying "hey". The openers that stall are not badly worded, they are badly shaped: they hand the other person a job to do before anything has been established. Three come up constantly.

The compliment that opens with an evaluation

Telling somebody they look good in the first four seconds sounds generous and lands as an assessment. It also puts them in the awkward position of having to respond to a verdict about their appearance from somebody they have known for four seconds, and the only available answers are a thank-you or a deflection. Neither goes anywhere. Say it in minute six if you still mean it.

The interview stack

Where are you from, how old are you, what do you do. Each of these is fine on its own. Fired in sequence they turn into a form, and the other person becomes a person filling in a form. The giveaway is that you are not responding to any of the answers, which is exactly how it feels from the other side.

Ask one question and then follow it. "Where are you from" is a good opener for a decade-old reason: it is easy to answer and the answer is worth hearing. The value is in the second question, the one that comes out of what they said.

The request disguised as a question

"Say something." "Turn your light on." "So what do you want to do?" All three transfer the effort to somebody who has no reason yet to spend it. The last one is the worst, because it looks polite while making the other person responsible for the conversation you started.

How to leave without it being awkward

Most chats end early. That is the format working, not failing, and the people who enjoy this most are the ones who stopped treating a short chat as a rejection. Still, there is a clean way and a messy way.

The clean way is a sentence and then leaving. "This isn't quite it for me, take care." Then go. You do not owe an explanation, and an explanation is almost always worse than the silence it replaces, because it invites a negotiation you did not want.

The messy way is drifting: going quiet, answering in single words, waiting for the other person to do it for you. It takes four minutes instead of four seconds and it is unpleasant for both of you. Being able to end something cleanly is the skill that makes starting things cheap, which is the whole reason a live format works at all.

One last thing worth knowing before you press start: you are not picking somebody off a list, and neither are they. You set a preference and get connected to whoever matched it and is on camera at that moment. If you want the mechanics, how the match preference works spells out what happens between pressing start and somebody appearing — including the part where opening the site and getting matched cost nothing, and calls run on coins at a rate you see beforehand.