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I think the biggest difference is that now it's mainstream. Back in the early 2000's online games were played by a faction of the population that plays them no

I think the biggest difference is that now it's mainstream. Back in the early 2000's online games were played by a faction of the population that plays them now. They were fringe, and having "online friends" was consitered to be weird and strange by most (I heard this plenty as my 2 closest friends I only met in person for the first time at my wedding in 2014! After having known them for almost 10 years at the point, and I heard plenty from even family about how it was "a bit weird"). That feeling has changed over the last few years, and now "online friends" are just friends, and the games themselves are actually almost the secondary reason many people play them. The primary being to hang out with their friends online.

shafyy 8y ago
Exactly.
anyfoo 8y ago
Hmm. Counterpoint. First, I don't doubt that making friends online is now much, much more common. But I'm surprised at the "weird and strange". I made some friends online as early as the 90s, in IRC for example. Some of them are such good friends, we still talk to each other every day. But I personally never remember anyone, neither family nor any of the friends that I did not meet online, giving the impression that they find this "strange" or "weird". And the majority of my friends I did not meet online. Few of them are much into computers, or active online, so I don't think there's some kind of bias. Even when we directly talk about it, e.g. "How did you meet X?" - "Met him online", I don't recall any surprise or judgement. Come to think of it, it's not really very different from "met in a classic car club". Having met my fiancée online, for contrast, is a bit different. Probably because it does not leave much room for a meet-cute story, and is a rather intentional thing (two people seeking a relationship) instead of a beautiful coincidence. I don't think people care very much about the "origin story" for friends on the other hand, unless it stands out on its own. I grew up in Germany, if that matters for context.
- theoh 8y ago
  Friendships that start online and stay online (without ever involving meeting IRL) have been a minority interest. I can't say whether that's changed now. It used to imply a decision to spend time interacting through a screen (either in real-time or over email or usenet) rather than socializing in physical space. The people who made that decision, consciously or unconsciously, for whatever reasons, were a self-selected group, and a significant fraction of them would not have identified as mainstream or neurotypical. To judgemental people in the mainstream, that equals weird and strange.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    FWIW: I have had a lot of online friends. I do not think of myself as part of some self-selected group. I'm medically handicapped and I was a military wife. For those and other reasons, I happened to spend a lot of time online and it's become a habit. The internet has been very life enhancing for me. If I were hail and hardy and had not ended up socially isolated for various reasons, I doubt I would choose to spend so much time online. But I made the best of the hand dealt me and this is where I ended up. From some perspective, that's probably true of a lot of internet devotees. If you are, for example, not neurotypical, the internet may work better than face-to-face interactions. I also think it's not all that nice to tell a relative their interests are "weird." I kind of feel like someone who would do that probably would come up with excuses to be othering no matter the details of your life.
  - anyfoo 8y ago
    Again, I just don’t have the impression that the origin story of a friend matters very much to anyone else than me and my friend. I have friends that I definitely would call “mainstream”, and some of them you might call judgmental. However, their perception would rather apply to the person, how they present themselves and behave, rather than to how I originally met that person. That factor is bound to be just a passing interest (“How’d you met by the way? Ah.”). If at all, because come to think of it, you already have to have formed some opinion, or somewhat care, about said friend to go as far as asking such a question. Ask yourself whether you’ve ever wondered with more than just fleeting, and therefore inconsequential, interest about how your friends have met their friends, the ones that you don’t have any strong feelings about yourself. Which, again, also seems to be a bit of a different story with the people you’re dating.
- usrusr 8y ago
  Slight tangent: if Fortnite has really become as mainstream as the term suggests, I'd expect that the "met online" kind of relationship would be mostly a thing of the past: if almost everybody is playing, playing with people from your physical sphere becomes a possibility and once that becomes the normal thing to do, hooking up with strangers on the internet might become quite exotic again.
alan_wade 8y ago
How do people end up finding friends online? I spend 90% of my time online, I post on forums, but I didn't end up making even one lasting online relationship. It seems like a fun thing to do though, how does that usually happen?
- noir_lord 8y ago
  In my case IRC, I started hanging around a programming channel related to a particular framework, over time we all pretty much moved off that framework for various reasons but a core group of us just spun a new IRC channel and moved over there. It's now my digital watercooler (I'm the only dev at work), interestingly many of the other regulars are sole devs or small company devs where they are the lead dev.
- saurik 8y ago
  How old are you? Like, serious question: if is a generally reported experience that people start to suck at randomly making friends as they approach 30.
  - anyfoo 8y ago
    Age does sound like a likely explanation. When I was younger, I made friends online pretty much the same as offline: Some people I just got along with very well, at some point hung out and talked with them more consciously (online or offline or both). Now that I'm older, that barely happens. Online or offline, even while I do meet new people and some friendship forms on some level, a certain distance remains and things often stay confided to a particular function (lunch group at work, people in an online group). I first tried to fight it, but now I suspect that I'm just more interested in furthering the relationships that I already have, instead of making room for new ones.
    - ethbro 8y ago
      I was thinking about this recently and decided it's probably another culprit: we're less tolerant of unexpected and different things as we get older. That seems kind of essential for younger-esque 'Hey, stranger who I know nothing about? Want to spend a lot of time together?'

shafyy 8y ago

Exactly.

anyfoo 8y ago

Hmm. Counterpoint. First, I don't doubt that making friends online is now much, much more common. But I'm surprised at the "weird and strange". I made some friends online as early as the 90s, in IRC for example. Some of them are such good friends, we still talk to each other every day. But I personally never remember anyone, neither family nor any of the friends that I did not meet online, giving the impression that they find this "strange" or "weird". And the majority of my friends I did not meet online. Few of them are much into computers, or active online, so I don't think there's some kind of bias. Even when we directly talk about it, e.g. "How did you meet X?" - "Met him online", I don't recall any surprise or judgement. Come to think of it, it's not really very different from "met in a classic car club". Having met my fiancée online, for contrast, is a bit different. Probably because it does not leave much room for a meet-cute story, and is a rather intentional thing (two people seeking a relationship) instead of a beautiful coincidence. I don't think people care very much about the "origin story" for friends on the other hand, unless it stands out on its own. I grew up in Germany, if that matters for context.

theoh 8y ago
Friendships that start online and stay online (without ever involving meeting IRL) have been a minority interest. I can't say whether that's changed now. It used to imply a decision to spend time interacting through a screen (either in real-time or over email or usenet) rather than socializing in physical space. The people who made that decision, consciously or unconsciously, for whatever reasons, were a self-selected group, and a significant fraction of them would not have identified as mainstream or neurotypical. To judgemental people in the mainstream, that equals weird and strange.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  FWIW: I have had a lot of online friends. I do not think of myself as part of some self-selected group. I'm medically handicapped and I was a military wife. For those and other reasons, I happened to spend a lot of time online and it's become a habit. The internet has been very life enhancing for me. If I were hail and hardy and had not ended up socially isolated for various reasons, I doubt I would choose to spend so much time online. But I made the best of the hand dealt me and this is where I ended up. From some perspective, that's probably true of a lot of internet devotees. If you are, for example, not neurotypical, the internet may work better than face-to-face interactions. I also think it's not all that nice to tell a relative their interests are "weird." I kind of feel like someone who would do that probably would come up with excuses to be othering no matter the details of your life.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  Again, I just don’t have the impression that the origin story of a friend matters very much to anyone else than me and my friend. I have friends that I definitely would call “mainstream”, and some of them you might call judgmental. However, their perception would rather apply to the person, how they present themselves and behave, rather than to how I originally met that person. That factor is bound to be just a passing interest (“How’d you met by the way? Ah.”). If at all, because come to think of it, you already have to have formed some opinion, or somewhat care, about said friend to go as far as asking such a question. Ask yourself whether you’ve ever wondered with more than just fleeting, and therefore inconsequential, interest about how your friends have met their friends, the ones that you don’t have any strong feelings about yourself. Which, again, also seems to be a bit of a different story with the people you’re dating.
usrusr 8y ago
Slight tangent: if Fortnite has really become as mainstream as the term suggests, I'd expect that the "met online" kind of relationship would be mostly a thing of the past: if almost everybody is playing, playing with people from your physical sphere becomes a possibility and once that becomes the normal thing to do, hooking up with strangers on the internet might become quite exotic again.

alan_wade 8y ago

How do people end up finding friends online? I spend 90% of my time online, I post on forums, but I didn't end up making even one lasting online relationship. It seems like a fun thing to do though, how does that usually happen?

noir_lord 8y ago
In my case IRC, I started hanging around a programming channel related to a particular framework, over time we all pretty much moved off that framework for various reasons but a core group of us just spun a new IRC channel and moved over there. It's now my digital watercooler (I'm the only dev at work), interestingly many of the other regulars are sole devs or small company devs where they are the lead dev.
saurik 8y ago
How old are you? Like, serious question: if is a generally reported experience that people start to suck at randomly making friends as they approach 30.
- anyfoo 8y ago
  Age does sound like a likely explanation. When I was younger, I made friends online pretty much the same as offline: Some people I just got along with very well, at some point hung out and talked with them more consciously (online or offline or both). Now that I'm older, that barely happens. Online or offline, even while I do meet new people and some friendship forms on some level, a certain distance remains and things often stay confided to a particular function (lunch group at work, people in an online group). I first tried to fight it, but now I suspect that I'm just more interested in furthering the relationships that I already have, instead of making room for new ones.
  - ethbro 8y ago
    I was thinking about this recently and decided it's probably another culprit: we're less tolerant of unexpected and different things as we get older. That seems kind of essential for younger-esque 'Hey, stranger who I know nothing about? Want to spend a lot of time together?'