The people who leave after three lines

Short answer: usually they are sorting rather than judging, and with skip one tap away they do it constantly. A single early exit tells you nothing worth knowing, and you cannot even be sure it was deliberate. When it happens nearly every time, the cause is usually your lighting or your microphone rather than your personality.

Why do so many people leave after two or three lines?

Because the next person is one tap away, and they are not really deciding about you — they are sorting. A lot of people arrive with a rough picture of the conversation they want and tap through until something matches it. That sorting happens fast, and it happens before any real information about you exists. The other common reasons have nothing to do with the room at all: someone opened the tab to kill four minutes, someone got a phone call, someone was only ever going to look and never planned to talk. With skip sitting right there on the screen, leaving early takes no effort and no explanation, so people do it constantly. The behaviour is a property of the format, not a running assessment of who passes through it.

Was it something I said?

Occasionally, but far less often than it feels. Three lines is rarely enough material to offend anyone — but a few things fit into three lines very easily, and those are the exits that genuinely are about you: opening with a request for a name, number or photo, a comment about someone's body, or a wall of text before they have said a word. If none of those is what you did, the odds are strongly that the exit had nothing to do with what you typed. And no single leave is worth analysing anyway — one of them tells you nothing at all. What is worth a look is whether the same thing keeps happening, which is a few questions down.

How do I tell an early exit from a dropped connection?

Mostly you cannot, and that is worth accepting rather than solving. From your side a deliberate leave and a failed connection look identical: the room simply closes. There are soft hints — someone mid-sentence when it cuts is more likely to have dropped than to have walked out, and a chat that ends the instant the camera loads is more likely a skip — but neither is reliable enough to build a theory on. The practical answer is to treat them as the same event, because your response is identical either way. The room is closed, the next match is a tap away, and no interpretation you construct changes anything.

Does it mean anything if it happens several times in a row?

A handful in a row means almost nothing — that is an ordinary stretch on a format where plenty of rooms end quickly. When it is happening nearly every time for a whole session, that is worth a look, and the thing to check first is not your personality but your picture. Being backlit, framed from below, or sitting in the dark gives a person nothing to react to, and no reaction defaults to leaving. Audio is the other common culprit: if your microphone is not working you will read as someone who is ignoring them. Rule those two out before you conclude anything about yourself, because they explain a lot of long runs. Open your own camera preview and look at it the way a stranger would, with the sound on. It is a two-minute check and it is the only diagnosis available to you.

What can I change about my own first three lines?

Give them something to answer, and only one thing. A single specific question — where they are, something you can see behind them — works better than a greeting, because a greeting hands the work back and they are two seconds from leaving. Do not stack three messages before they have replied to the first; it reads as pressure and it is one of the most common self-inflicted exits. Say something within the first couple of seconds rather than waiting to be addressed, since silence at the start is usually read as disinterest. None of this makes people stay who were never going to. It just stops you losing the ones who might have.

If the opening three lines are the part you dread, a smaller first attempt takes the pressure off entirely.

Should I be leaving early too?

Yes, and doing it a few times fixes the sting faster than any reframing will. Once you have skipped somebody at second three for no articulable reason, the whole mechanic stops feeling like a judgement being handed down and starts feeling like what it is — two people independently sorting. Skip sits on every room screen precisely so that leaving is the easy action rather than the dramatic one; block and report live on the profile of the person you matched with, not in the room. You do not owe anyone a goodbye, an explanation or a warm-up period, and neither did the last person who left you. Skipping is the normal move here, in both directions, and using it yourself is the fastest way to stop reading it as an insult when it lands on you.