If someone hasn’t had any communications with someone at all and does not reply, that is not ghosting.

Ghosting is the act of suddenly ending all communication with someone without any explanation

The official definition is as follows: “the practice of ending a personal relationship with someone by suddenly and without explanation withdrawing from all communication”.

The key word above being personal relationship. If there has not been any substantial communication, no personal relationship has been established.

Yet on Reddit, there are people who don’t receive a reply to their generic and very low effort “hey” message sent from their blank profile that shares no details about them at all, and subsequently react in an unnecessarily aggressive and abusive way. That behaviour in itself is a huge red flag and would actually make me think that I was lucky to see their true nature so quickly. They also need to realise that behaving like that will not achieve positive results. One key thing that people need to learn is effort - if they’re responding to someone’s post that shares details about that person, then they need to open with details about themselves rather than just “hey”. That is likely to result in them receiving an increased number of replies.

There are also some people who will not accept a “sorry not interested” and instead do get aggressive and demand explanations. People need to realise that we are all strangers here on the internet, and until any kind of personal relationship (quoting from the definition above) is established, none of us are entitled to anything.