Fight stupid with stupid.
In this case, random copypastas are one thing that works well. Wastes their time, and communicates the fact that you think they are stupid. *cue Undertaker copypasta*
Also, would be great if every community had the tiananmen copypasta stickied.
This is not correct. A “neurotypical” (term is terrible, there are good reasons) does not “mask” in most situations. They are simply using their own personality. People with autism have this nasty habit of trying to find “the correct answer”, which is something that simply doesn’t exist most of the time. If a normal person is masking, it is likely that they are doing so because they are still trying to maintain some image of civility.
The other part of this is that a question with no correct answer, however, still has wrong answers. If someone asks you what you are doing this weekend, “researching goatse” is a most certainly a wrong answer. All of this is dependent on the other person. In the case of a random person, it’s easier to just leave out everything longer than a single sentence, which is why talking with strangers always feels oddly hollow.
Example
It is true, though, that an average person doesn’t have to think about every sensory input. That’s the only real high-level difference. Most people are also incapable of focusing on more than one task. It just seems like multitasking or speedy processing because they can drop tasks at a moment’s notice. For someone who actually does have hardware multitasking, high process speed, and acute sense of time, interacting with an average person feels like an eternity. If I had to fancy a fat guess, I’d say this is why people with autism seem to prefer online interaction – because there’s no timelines for said interaction, and the lack of the information that they have to track makes interacting much faster.