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I quit those tools too and realized the number of real relationships I had was dramatically lower than I would have guessed. Leading one to wonder. If the frie

I quit those tools too and realized the number of real relationships I had was dramatically lower than I would have guessed. Leading one to wonder. If the friendships or whatever feelings these tools provide are placebo vs real. If something bad happens to you in the real world are the online friends going to help? Does support extend to seeing a number with a heart next to it. Does getting 1000 hearts replace the support of close friends when you experience loss?

eckza 8y ago
I found this to be the case as well. In my experience: it's allowed me to focus all of my emotional energy on the 5-8 actual close relationships that I have, rather than burning myself out living like some kind of small-time celebrity with an audience of hundreds of casual acquaintances that expect me to like posts and respond to messages at their beck and call.
- baroffoos 8y ago
  I feel like I have fallen in to this trap. I have become fairly well known on an IM platform just by creating/running a lot of group chats and I get loads of people PMing me wanting to chat so I end up having hundreds of small conversations with people I don't know rather than spending a lot of time with a few people I care about. But I also don't want to seem rude and ignore everyone.
  - eckza 8y ago
    I was like you, once. I helped run a hobbyist group on Facebook with ~15,000 members. I made myself as available to everyone as possible, frequently ignoring my wife actual friends to help random strangers over Messenger. Hours and hours and hours of my life burnt, wasted, gone. All for the sake of "helping grow the sport". One day, I just quit. Left everyone in the lurch, with no explanation. It was a huge turning point in my personal life. My mental health improved immediately - and all of a sudden, I had so much more time and emotional energy for the things in my life that I really, truly cared about. I've kept in touch with a handful of people that I was close to. My new policy is, "if I need to hear from you, you'll know because you have my phone number". The rest of them are still there, arguing about clipless vs flat pedals, and chromoly vs carbon fiber, and everything else, as if I'd never left - or showed up in the first place. More likely than not, they'll forget about you just as casually as they came into contact with you. Ask yourself if it would REALLY bother you to never hear from them again. In my case, it didn't; and I know for a fact that it really didn't bother them to go for long periods of time without hearing from me, too. It's okay to let acquaintances be acquaintances. You owe them exactly as much as they owe you - in the case of these people, it's "pretty much nothing" - in the case of the people who are a major part of your actual life, it's "a hell of a lot".
avip 8y ago
By definition, you need someone to be physically with you for real support. There's no such thing as "remote support".
- lbotos 8y ago
  You can absolutely provide emotional support "remotely". Do you think that's not the case?
  - monetus 8y ago
    I have a feeling he was trying to touch upon the arm chair psychology involving mirror neurons. ..or maybe just trying to say it's more effective in person. But that seems self evident.
    - fjsolwmv 8y ago
      Mirror neurons (on which the science is suspect) don't require physical touch.
      - monetus 8y ago
        But sight probably triggers them more than just hearing someone's voice. I guess video calls are somewhat more common now though.
code_duck 8y ago
Yes, when I’ve left social media it’s isolated me from people. But that makes sense, as I hadn’t seen them lately. What do you mean by ‘real’? Just about any relationship withers when you stop being in regular contact. Since you quit social media, but wish for your friends from there to contact you, do they have a comfortable way to do it? Leaving a phone or email isn’t the same since the importance or priority level of an e-mail or phone call is different than the casual contact of social media. Yes, i have heard of and been an online friend who helps people offline. Fund raisers, contact with nearby relatives when concerned, checking on people, plus the fact that this IS the real world and emotional support online is the same thing as ‘offline’. L If something bad happens online, your online friends can help there, too, but your ‘real world’ friends by definition can’t really.
- im3w1l 8y ago
  > Leaving a phone or email isn’t the same since the importance or priority level of an e-mail or phone call is different than the casual contact of social media. I think that's the point they are making. That "casual" is a distraction from deeper relationships.
  - code_duck 8y ago
    The problem I see is that the “deeper” relationships have something of a friction problem. People feel neglected until they have a serious issue.
pweissbrod 8y ago
The way I use it it keeps channels open. But I'll check it once every few months really. Don't feel the need to quit because I'm not addicted
HenryBemis 8y ago
To (mis) quote TheMinimalists [1] they frequently mention that most relationships are born out of proximity and/or convenience. Facebook, with (many times) meaningless word exchange (I can't call these discussions) trick us into thinking them as friendships. This is the convenience part, combined with Facebook nomenclature ("Friends") also helps to that direction. I quit FB approx 2 years ago and Instagram 1 year ago. I don't miss any of the 250 'friends'. For the 5 people I care to keep in touch frequently, I have installed Signal on my smartphone and my PC and we chat very frequently (when we don't meet) [1]: https://www.theminimalists.com/values/ https://www.theminimalists.com/values/
- elvirs 8y ago
  -having grown up (and going to first 6 grades of school) in a small village with very tight community. -going thru 5 years of boarding school with very strong alumni traditions (kind of sect actually) -6 years of going to college and living on campus of a large University -living in a foreign country with very tight immigrant community of 'my country people' for the past 8 years I can say that yes, unfortunately and surprisingly, friendships and relationships are born out of and maintained mostly thanks to proximity and necessity.
z3t4 8y ago
Relations are all about spending time with someone. The problem with online friends is that the time might be unproportional, you might spend hours with someone's content and feel very involved, meanwhile they don't even look at yours. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. communities is best for the popular people, and way more "efficient" then the real world. The only problem is that they can't share their private issues, that's what you need real friends for.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  But don't forget the cases where you have a problem and no one it meatspace can help, but an Internet forum can. This is common for social/psychological problems.
  - jsemrau 8y ago
    Interesting point. Works better in anonymity in my opinion
dvtrn 8y ago
Similar experience. Not only did I realize how much we've come to rely on these sites lately to "stay in touch", I also realized who the people were that actually wanted to. The ones who asked "did you quit Facebook?" via good old fashioned text message (lol I'm being slightly silly here but only just) and actually stayed in touch, actually would mention events going on to make sure I knew I was invited...it was quite an experience. One friend has gone above and beyond in being accessible and supportive following a divorce recently and helping me find a therapist, dropping by to talk in person etc. Those are the relationships that will follow you to the grave and I'm thankful for it.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  I'm curious, when you with FB, did YOU reach out to everyone you cared about? Else it seems a bit hypocritical.
  - dvtrn 8y ago
    Quite frequently, and often times at great emotional cost that isn't getting discussed in any detail here.
fjsolwmv 8y ago
You can ask all the same questions of meatspace associates, and get just as scary answers. Loneliness and abandonment existed before the Internet.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  In some ways, I've found it worse now. Everyone's too damn obsessed with their phones. It's hard to get people to talk and form a meaningful relationship when they're sitting burried in Facebook or Reddit. So even quitting Facebook hasn't really helped as much as I hoped it would, except it means I can pretend they're not tracking my every move easier.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
If something bad happens to you in the real world are the online friends going to help? It's been a while since I've had real friends on the internet. I can't say if that's "my life" or if that's "the internet has changed." But here are things from my past life with internet friends: 1. They helped me get healthier after doctors wrote me off for dead, including hand-packing pure medication without chemical additives typically found in store bought brands and mailing it to me as a Christmas present. 2. They helped me figure out how to raise and appropriately educate my special needs sons. 3. They exchanged Christmas presents with me. 4. They met me for lunch or made a day of it every couple of years when they were in the area. 5. They helped me start my first website. 6. They helped me attend two different conferences on the cheap, one in gifted education, the other in urban planning. 7. They helped me make it through the night without killing myself. 8. They helped me make it through my divorce under very difficult circumstances without killing myself. (Yes, I also did things for them. I'm not listing it here out of respect for their privacy and brevity.) Those are just the things that obviously come to mind off the top of my head without thinking too hard about it. And then I was homeless for a few years and saw just how amazingly shitty people on the planet are capable of being. When I most needed some kind of support, the entire world just wanted to let me know I was a total fucking loser who didn't deserve any support whatsoever. In fact, an awful lot of people wanted to make sure they did all in their power to make my life worse while pretending they were good people or some nonsense. So I just have no idea at this point if the world I knew somehow magically disappeared, is gone forever and cannot come back or just what. But I have, in fact, known real friends via internet, some of whom had a profound positive impact on my life though we never met in person nor even called each other on the phone. Edit: To be fair, none of these were Instagram or Facebook friends. But they were internet friends.
- andkenneth 8y ago
  Are those really "internet friends" though? Sounds like you just met them on the internet and then became friends (without any qualifiers) considering you have met them IRL on a number of occasions.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
jniedrauer 8y ago
Ironically, I kind of experienced this in reverse. I grew up in a very isolated place, and many of my first close friends were from the internet. Someone I knew from IRC, whose name I don't know to this day, gave me my first computer monitor. I lived with another person I met on IRC for a while, rent free. As a young person, I was able to count on online friends to give me a place to crash or a meal when I was hungry. As an adult, I'm not really sure that I could ask these things of my "real" friends.
- addicted 8y ago
  I’d argue IRC was very different from today’s social media. If you wanted to build a friendship, you’d normally spend hours and days chatting with individuals before you’d consider them a friend of any sort. With social media it’s reversed. You first friend someone and then maybe possibly build a relationship. All the activities you do in common with the vast majority of ‘friends’ is as mindless as possible (liking something or commenting but the comment rarely has any bearing on the actual individual whose post you’re commenting on).
cableshaft 8y ago
We lost our dog a little over a year ago and I posted about him going missing online along with the most recent video of him I had taken. That post ended up getting reshared 8,000 times, the video got 215,000 views, and I was getting contacted by random people in the region constantly about how they were keeping an eye out looking for my dog, or sharing any info they thought they might have (there was some dogs found nearby that looked similar but weren't him, for example). We got a couple sightings through it, although ultimately we found him four days later after someone spotted him and then saw one of our lost dog posters a couple of miles away and called us, so he wasn't found directly by it. I even had people I only considered to be internet friends tell me how they spent time after work driving around looking for him, sometimes for a lot longer than would be reasonably expected. So, I didn't really consider social media to be all that useful before I had the scariest thing in my life happen to me (so far at least), and then I discovered people online really can do more than just give a 'Like' or a 'Sad Face'.

eckza 8y ago

I found this to be the case as well. In my experience: it's allowed me to focus all of my emotional energy on the 5-8 actual close relationships that I have, rather than burning myself out living like some kind of small-time celebrity with an audience of hundreds of casual acquaintances that expect me to like posts and respond to messages at their beck and call.

baroffoos 8y ago
I feel like I have fallen in to this trap. I have become fairly well known on an IM platform just by creating/running a lot of group chats and I get loads of people PMing me wanting to chat so I end up having hundreds of small conversations with people I don't know rather than spending a lot of time with a few people I care about. But I also don't want to seem rude and ignore everyone.
- eckza 8y ago
  I was like you, once. I helped run a hobbyist group on Facebook with ~15,000 members. I made myself as available to everyone as possible, frequently ignoring my wife actual friends to help random strangers over Messenger. Hours and hours and hours of my life burnt, wasted, gone. All for the sake of "helping grow the sport". One day, I just quit. Left everyone in the lurch, with no explanation. It was a huge turning point in my personal life. My mental health improved immediately - and all of a sudden, I had so much more time and emotional energy for the things in my life that I really, truly cared about. I've kept in touch with a handful of people that I was close to. My new policy is, "if I need to hear from you, you'll know because you have my phone number". The rest of them are still there, arguing about clipless vs flat pedals, and chromoly vs carbon fiber, and everything else, as if I'd never left - or showed up in the first place. More likely than not, they'll forget about you just as casually as they came into contact with you. Ask yourself if it would REALLY bother you to never hear from them again. In my case, it didn't; and I know for a fact that it really didn't bother them to go for long periods of time without hearing from me, too. It's okay to let acquaintances be acquaintances. You owe them exactly as much as they owe you - in the case of these people, it's "pretty much nothing" - in the case of the people who are a major part of your actual life, it's "a hell of a lot".

avip 8y ago

By definition, you need someone to be physically with you for real support. There's no such thing as "remote support".

lbotos 8y ago
You can absolutely provide emotional support "remotely". Do you think that's not the case?
- monetus 8y ago
  I have a feeling he was trying to touch upon the arm chair psychology involving mirror neurons. ..or maybe just trying to say it's more effective in person. But that seems self evident.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    Mirror neurons (on which the science is suspect) don't require physical touch.
    - monetus 8y ago
      But sight probably triggers them more than just hearing someone's voice. I guess video calls are somewhat more common now though.

code_duck 8y ago

Yes, when I’ve left social media it’s isolated me from people. But that makes sense, as I hadn’t seen them lately. What do you mean by ‘real’? Just about any relationship withers when you stop being in regular contact. Since you quit social media, but wish for your friends from there to contact you, do they have a comfortable way to do it? Leaving a phone or email isn’t the same since the importance or priority level of an e-mail or phone call is different than the casual contact of social media. Yes, i have heard of and been an online friend who helps people offline. Fund raisers, contact with nearby relatives when concerned, checking on people, plus the fact that this IS the real world and emotional support online is the same thing as ‘offline’. L If something bad happens online, your online friends can help there, too, but your ‘real world’ friends by definition can’t really.

im3w1l 8y ago
> Leaving a phone or email isn’t the same since the importance or priority level of an e-mail or phone call is different than the casual contact of social media. I think that's the point they are making. That "casual" is a distraction from deeper relationships.
- code_duck 8y ago
  The problem I see is that the “deeper” relationships have something of a friction problem. People feel neglected until they have a serious issue.

pweissbrod 8y ago

The way I use it it keeps channels open. But I'll check it once every few months really. Don't feel the need to quit because I'm not addicted

HenryBemis 8y ago

To (mis) quote TheMinimalists [1] they frequently mention that most relationships are born out of proximity and/or convenience. Facebook, with (many times) meaningless word exchange (I can't call these discussions) trick us into thinking them as friendships. This is the convenience part, combined with Facebook nomenclature ("Friends") also helps to that direction. I quit FB approx 2 years ago and Instagram 1 year ago. I don't miss any of the 250 'friends'. For the 5 people I care to keep in touch frequently, I have installed Signal on my smartphone and my PC and we chat very frequently (when we don't meet) [1]: https://www.theminimalists.com/values/ https://www.theminimalists.com/values/

elvirs 8y ago
-having grown up (and going to first 6 grades of school) in a small village with very tight community. -going thru 5 years of boarding school with very strong alumni traditions (kind of sect actually) -6 years of going to college and living on campus of a large University -living in a foreign country with very tight immigrant community of 'my country people' for the past 8 years I can say that yes, unfortunately and surprisingly, friendships and relationships are born out of and maintained mostly thanks to proximity and necessity.

z3t4 8y ago

Relations are all about spending time with someone. The problem with online friends is that the time might be unproportional, you might spend hours with someone's content and feel very involved, meanwhile they don't even look at yours. Facebook, Twitter, et. al. communities is best for the popular people, and way more "efficient" then the real world. The only problem is that they can't share their private issues, that's what you need real friends for.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
But don't forget the cases where you have a problem and no one it meatspace can help, but an Internet forum can. This is common for social/psychological problems.
- jsemrau 8y ago
  Interesting point. Works better in anonymity in my opinion

dvtrn 8y ago

Similar experience. Not only did I realize how much we've come to rely on these sites lately to "stay in touch", I also realized who the people were that actually wanted to. The ones who asked "did you quit Facebook?" via good old fashioned text message (lol I'm being slightly silly here but only just) and actually stayed in touch, actually would mention events going on to make sure I knew I was invited...it was quite an experience. One friend has gone above and beyond in being accessible and supportive following a divorce recently and helping me find a therapist, dropping by to talk in person etc. Those are the relationships that will follow you to the grave and I'm thankful for it.

fjsolwmv 8y ago
I'm curious, when you with FB, did YOU reach out to everyone you cared about? Else it seems a bit hypocritical.
- dvtrn 8y ago
  Quite frequently, and often times at great emotional cost that isn't getting discussed in any detail here.

fjsolwmv 8y ago

You can ask all the same questions of meatspace associates, and get just as scary answers. Loneliness and abandonment existed before the Internet.

dorchadas 8y ago
In some ways, I've found it worse now. Everyone's too damn obsessed with their phones. It's hard to get people to talk and form a meaningful relationship when they're sitting burried in Facebook or Reddit. So even quitting Facebook hasn't really helped as much as I hoped it would, except it means I can pretend they're not tracking my every move easier.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

If something bad happens to you in the real world are the online friends going to help? It's been a while since I've had real friends on the internet. I can't say if that's "my life" or if that's "the internet has changed." But here are things from my past life with internet friends: 1. They helped me get healthier after doctors wrote me off for dead, including hand-packing pure medication without chemical additives typically found in store bought brands and mailing it to me as a Christmas present. 2. They helped me figure out how to raise and appropriately educate my special needs sons. 3. They exchanged Christmas presents with me. 4. They met me for lunch or made a day of it every couple of years when they were in the area. 5. They helped me start my first website. 6. They helped me attend two different conferences on the cheap, one in gifted education, the other in urban planning. 7. They helped me make it through the night without killing myself. 8. They helped me make it through my divorce under very difficult circumstances without killing myself. (Yes, I also did things for them. I'm not listing it here out of respect for their privacy and brevity.) Those are just the things that obviously come to mind off the top of my head without thinking too hard about it. And then I was homeless for a few years and saw just how amazingly shitty people on the planet are capable of being. When I most needed some kind of support, the entire world just wanted to let me know I was a total fucking loser who didn't deserve any support whatsoever. In fact, an awful lot of people wanted to make sure they did all in their power to make my life worse while pretending they were good people or some nonsense. So I just have no idea at this point if the world I knew somehow magically disappeared, is gone forever and cannot come back or just what. But I have, in fact, known real friends via internet, some of whom had a profound positive impact on my life though we never met in person nor even called each other on the phone. Edit: To be fair, none of these were Instagram or Facebook friends. But they were internet friends.

andkenneth 8y ago
Are those really "internet friends" though? Sounds like you just met them on the internet and then became friends (without any qualifiers) considering you have met them IRL on a number of occasions.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago

jniedrauer 8y ago

Ironically, I kind of experienced this in reverse. I grew up in a very isolated place, and many of my first close friends were from the internet. Someone I knew from IRC, whose name I don't know to this day, gave me my first computer monitor. I lived with another person I met on IRC for a while, rent free. As a young person, I was able to count on online friends to give me a place to crash or a meal when I was hungry. As an adult, I'm not really sure that I could ask these things of my "real" friends.

addicted 8y ago
I’d argue IRC was very different from today’s social media. If you wanted to build a friendship, you’d normally spend hours and days chatting with individuals before you’d consider them a friend of any sort. With social media it’s reversed. You first friend someone and then maybe possibly build a relationship. All the activities you do in common with the vast majority of ‘friends’ is as mindless as possible (liking something or commenting but the comment rarely has any bearing on the actual individual whose post you’re commenting on).

cableshaft 8y ago

We lost our dog a little over a year ago and I posted about him going missing online along with the most recent video of him I had taken. That post ended up getting reshared 8,000 times, the video got 215,000 views, and I was getting contacted by random people in the region constantly about how they were keeping an eye out looking for my dog, or sharing any info they thought they might have (there was some dogs found nearby that looked similar but weren't him, for example). We got a couple sightings through it, although ultimately we found him four days later after someone spotted him and then saw one of our lost dog posters a couple of miles away and called us, so he wasn't found directly by it. I even had people I only considered to be internet friends tell me how they spent time after work driving around looking for him, sometimes for a lot longer than would be reasonably expected. So, I didn't really consider social media to be all that useful before I had the scariest thing in my life happen to me (so far at least), and then I discovered people online really can do more than just give a 'Like' or a 'Sad Face'.