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> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of

> Turns out that a lot of people I knew posted huge life updates that I completely missed out on This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post blasted to hundreds (or thousands) of people. Or, to put it another way: if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them. I'd argue that social media has normalized keeping up with people who aren't supposed to be part of your life forever. But, we should take a step back and realize that not everything should or will last forever. If you cross paths again then you can catch up, but having life updates constantly? No thanks.

standardUser 2y ago
> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  Maybe I could've worded that better, but I was just providing perspective on the obsessive nature that we have on social media now. IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times. They're no longer part of your life and you need to let go. If others find the life updates useful and beneficial to them, then so be it. I don't care either way.
  - zapzupnz 2y ago
    > IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times. Fully recognising that you said "IMO", I'll say that keeping up with acquaintances and people from the past is normal in my culture. Social media helps to make that more direct and easier to manage than the gossipy grapevine of yore. What's normal depends on your culture and context, of course, and I suspect that's not true in yours — but it is in mine, so ditching something like Facebook is just out of the question for me and many people whose cultures place a heavy emphasis on those connections between people. The middle ground for me has been to check Facebook less and less, accelerated by the algorithm delivering me fewer life updates and more slop reposted from reddit.
    - skeeter2020 2y ago
      if the goal is easier to manage and more direct, I'd argue it's not that important. Is your culture 20 years old? What did they do before? There are lots of things in the world where the work required IS the value. Think of a hand written note from your CEO; is it still valuable if it was their assistant and a picture of the signature? "keeping in touch" is not inheriently valuable; it's the effort required that makes it so.
      - watwut 2y ago
        People before deliberately kept contact with acquitances over time and I recall older people regretting not keeping this or that contact.
      - zapzupnz 2y ago
        > Is your culture 20 years old? What did they do before? Our people barely left our homelands, our pā and marae, for fear of them being stolen by pākeha-let governments who urbanised the rest of us into poverty. Now that people in my culture are reconnecting with the importance of whakapapa for whānau, hapū, and iwi, which is a far wider set of people than just one’s immediate family in typical anglospherical thought, there has to be a way to reincorporate all the urbanised people who live far away. Social media, at least initially, provides that. But thank you for your “is your culture only 20 years old” crack. It’s always refreshing to have the needs of my culture explained to me by someone from without it with an air of armchair authority, as though I or we don’t know what’s good for ourselves to meet our own needs.
  - harvodex 2y ago
    I agree with you but I think we are kind of the oddballs at this point. It does seem quite normal now to keep up with people you haven't seen in 10 years in person and will never see again. Maybe even people you would go out of your way to make sure you don't see in person but you can give them a thumbs up when they post a picture of their lunch. I have no idea why anyone does this but it would be hard for me to say that not having any social media like us is "normal".
- exitb 2y ago
  Due to some unknown circumstances this might not be true for this person, but it’s certainly true for a lot of people. Social media used in that context is effectively automating human relationships. It used to take effort to have a handful of friends, now you can have hundreds. Somewhere along the way though, friendship turned from active effort to passive status.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Are these really friends though? Or just some people you met and appreciated in the past?
    - watwut 2y ago
      People you met and appreciated in the past evolve into friends and friends evolve into people you met and appreciated in the past. Each person can change "the status" multiple times, depending on circumstances. However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out. And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics". We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked.
      - prmoustache 2y ago
        > People you met and appreciated in the past evolve into friends and friends evolve into people you met and appreciated in the past. Each person can change "the status" multiple times, depending on circumstances. Agree with that. > However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out. I don't think putting thumbs up on social media posts count as "growing into friendship". > And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics". I am not even sure a _loneliness epidemics_ exists but if that is true it is mostly self induced and artificial relationship pretense on social medias do not help. Quite the contrary. If you get out of social medias you actually realize your only chance to make relationships is by going outside and meet people that are close to you. And this is how you build relationships that matters and prevent loneliness. > We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked. I am an expatriate and moved countries several times. I have lost touch with a lot of my old friends as well as a huge part of my larger family because I don't use facebook and instagram. That doesn't mean I don't have relationships. I made new relationships locally, and am keeping in touch with people who are not in the same country but that are as eager as I am to travel once in a while to see me. OTOH last few years I have called a number of friends who are living abroad or several hours of train/plane/driving away from me at least once a year. Some gave unsolicited apologies and promises that next time they will be the one calling, or that they have plan to visit my area. They never called back, nor visited me and I didn't prioritized them enough to try to visit them either. This year I didn't even try to call them. I just moved them from the _friends_ mental drawer to the _acquaintance_ mental drawer. This is very likely what they passively did 2 years ago already while I was still actively trying to stay in touch. If for some reason I travel close enough to their last known place, I may try to contact them but it is very likely that I may never see most of them. But I don't need to follow what they are posting on social medias nor publish stuff I am living and pretend that I or they care because really we do not, or not enough for it to matter.
- ozim 2y ago
  You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away and most likely have no place in our lives.(by far away I mean you don’t actually get to talk or meet with them or even chat by messanger or so, even if they could live in the same city - I have friends who live far away but we actually meet at least once a year and chat once a week we are far in distance but not far in contact) I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day. There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.
  - standardUser 2y ago
    > You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away... Yes, absolutely. The paths our lives take can lead us to have more in common with someone we knew in the past then when we first knew them. And there's a lot of value in having a history with someone, compared to getting to know someone new from scratch. Maintaining loose contact takes virtually no effort but can lead to meaningful interactions down the road.
    - johannes1234321 2y ago
      Yes, I have a few very good remote friends which I meet only rarely, but when it's one of the best kind of things. However most of my "Facebook friends" were shallow faint contacts, where paths may have been close for a while but went apart as each went on with their lives. No more scrolling through which bar they visited, how their kids are doing, or which TV show they were watching didn't take anything from my life, while it encouraged me to reach out more actively to people I really care about, as I didn't "rely" on passive information anymore, assuming to hear about "relevant" events, but became interested in them and shared things which wouldn't make "public" social media.
      - ozim 2y ago
        I think I would add that: if I would be posting stuff and then someone who was an acquaintance only - would hit up a conversation about my wedding photos from 5 years ago how he remembers all were great, or would go with conversation about tv show I just added on my profile. I would not feel comfortable, to say the least, I would feel creeped out. I would start thinking what kind of MLM he joined or if he looks to borrow money as last resort as no one closer would lend him any. If that would be my close friend that would be OK.
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections. are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all. The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.
  - calvinmorrison 2y ago
    Free for 8 years-ish. Yeah. its hard to look people up. Oh im in this town, yeah wonder what happened to xyz, no chance of finding them or shooting them a message. FB connections are so low key and keeping people around makes them easier to find and stay in touch with, IMO. But there's also lots of upsides. I guess I dont know one way or the other.
pmarreck 2y ago
> a call from them um... will someone else tell him/her, or should I?
- prmoustache 2y ago
  My partner (who's family is living 10000km away on another side of an ocean) learned her estranged father died a few days ago and that he had been terminally ill for months. Apparently someone from that part of the family had posted it on facebook but she didn't notice it as she do not visit it every day.
  - pmarreck 2y ago
    People are lazy, and the winning solution (like it or not) is apparently the one that most people default to when they are lazy. For most people, that is arguably currently Facebook.
slg 2y ago
>if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them. That ignores the asymmetry of a lot of life events. For example, if a parent died, I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them, I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.
- vFunct 2y ago
  Indeed and in the olden times a lot of these life events would have been announced in the local newspaper. But these days, I don’t even know where to even buy a newspaper, let alone make sure everyone is reading it and keeping up with local news. So social media it is, which sucks because they’re extremely edited and filtered out by the algorithm.
  - nradov 2y ago
    On Facebook at least, the algorithm is heavily tuned to prioritize major life events: births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc. Occasionally those posts get filtered out but usually they do get prioritized near the top of your feed.
  - kelnos 2y ago
    For the people who you care about, you can contact them directly and set up a time to meet to catch up. Or catch up over text or email. Or start a messaging group with mutual friends and keep each other up to date that way. My feeling is that if you only get updates about someone's life via their blasts on social media, you're not really friends. So why do you need to hear about all that stuff?
    - vFunct 2y ago
      Right. You post it on social media to the exact same reason you would post it in the newspaper. And you would have to understand socialization if you wanted to know why people published life events to the newspaper - births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc. Not everything in the world is for your bestest friends. It’s OK to not have close friends.
mvdtnz 2y ago
Good thing we have you, hypeatai, telling us who (and who not) we're "supposed" to stay in touch with.
veunes 2y ago
But it’s also nice to know what’s going on in people’s lives without needing a deep connection...
- kelnos 2y ago
  But why, though? If all you have is a shallow social-media connection with someone, why is it nice to know what's going on in their lives? We have a finite amount of time and energy to maintain connections with people. Even shallow connections eat into that. I'd rather spend that time and energy on deeper connections. And while it's customary to say "but sure, I guess other people have different views on this, so to each their own", I... well, I honestly believe it's unhealthy to obsessively try to maintain all these sorts of shallow connections. I think this is a part of why I read about how so many people are lonely these days and have trouble forming friendships and keeping them going.
  - Karrot_Kream 2y ago
    Because sometimes you rekindle relationships that have drifted apart but you still stayed somewhat tethered to thanks to social media. I rekindled a friendship with an old friend when I realized he was visiting the same foreign country as I was. Funny enough his wife is a mutual college friend of ours whom he had lost touch with but only met again after reconnecting on social media. I also reconnected with her through my friend.
    - veunes 2y ago
      Yep! And those little updates can sometimes lead to unexpected and meaningful reconnections, like your story with your friend and his wife.
  - veunes 2y ago
    Sometimes, those casual connections can spark something more meaningful down the line or just bring small moments of joy! Like, for instance, seeing an old friend’s travel photos or knowing that you're school friend had a baby
Whatsappsuks 2y ago
Agreed. I also went through it and have found no difficulty with throwing away Facebook, Twitter, etc and sticking to only direct or group messaging. Some people HAVE gone through the "but I said in X group chat" like above, but it was all unimportant life events that they were happy to fill me in on there instead. All major things people told me directly. Just because I quit social media didn't mean I wasn't aware of the death of my dog from a world away within 2 minutes of it happening.
MrOrelliOReilly 2y ago
Yes, agreed. For me, quitting social media went hand in hand with a recognition that I maintained superficial contact with a large number of old friends. My relationship with these people was already “illusory”, or at least unsatisfying. Now my relationships are the product of active work, which I find more valuable, even if it means maintaining contact with a smaller group of close contacts (outside my day to day relationships). It doesn’t mean my relationship with old friends and family has died… we just have a lot more to catch-up about when we talk to each other!

standardUser 2y ago

> This doesn't really seem that important if your only method of knowing this was a post The landscape of human relationships is deep and broad an varied, and if making bold assumptions about what other people should value is your starting point, you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections.

hypeatei 2y ago
Maybe I could've worded that better, but I was just providing perspective on the obsessive nature that we have on social media now. IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times. They're no longer part of your life and you need to let go. If others find the life updates useful and beneficial to them, then so be it. I don't care either way.
- zapzupnz 2y ago
  > IMO, it's not "normal" to keep up with acquaintances and people from past times. Fully recognising that you said "IMO", I'll say that keeping up with acquaintances and people from the past is normal in my culture. Social media helps to make that more direct and easier to manage than the gossipy grapevine of yore. What's normal depends on your culture and context, of course, and I suspect that's not true in yours — but it is in mine, so ditching something like Facebook is just out of the question for me and many people whose cultures place a heavy emphasis on those connections between people. The middle ground for me has been to check Facebook less and less, accelerated by the algorithm delivering me fewer life updates and more slop reposted from reddit.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    if the goal is easier to manage and more direct, I'd argue it's not that important. Is your culture 20 years old? What did they do before? There are lots of things in the world where the work required IS the value. Think of a hand written note from your CEO; is it still valuable if it was their assistant and a picture of the signature? "keeping in touch" is not inheriently valuable; it's the effort required that makes it so.
    - watwut 2y ago
      People before deliberately kept contact with acquitances over time and I recall older people regretting not keeping this or that contact.
    - zapzupnz 2y ago
      > Is your culture 20 years old? What did they do before? Our people barely left our homelands, our pā and marae, for fear of them being stolen by pākeha-let governments who urbanised the rest of us into poverty. Now that people in my culture are reconnecting with the importance of whakapapa for whānau, hapū, and iwi, which is a far wider set of people than just one’s immediate family in typical anglospherical thought, there has to be a way to reincorporate all the urbanised people who live far away. Social media, at least initially, provides that. But thank you for your “is your culture only 20 years old” crack. It’s always refreshing to have the needs of my culture explained to me by someone from without it with an air of armchair authority, as though I or we don’t know what’s good for ourselves to meet our own needs.
- harvodex 2y ago
  I agree with you but I think we are kind of the oddballs at this point. It does seem quite normal now to keep up with people you haven't seen in 10 years in person and will never see again. Maybe even people you would go out of your way to make sure you don't see in person but you can give them a thumbs up when they post a picture of their lunch. I have no idea why anyone does this but it would be hard for me to say that not having any social media like us is "normal".
exitb 2y ago
Due to some unknown circumstances this might not be true for this person, but it’s certainly true for a lot of people. Social media used in that context is effectively automating human relationships. It used to take effort to have a handful of friends, now you can have hundreds. Somewhere along the way though, friendship turned from active effort to passive status.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Are these really friends though? Or just some people you met and appreciated in the past?
  - watwut 2y ago
    People you met and appreciated in the past evolve into friends and friends evolve into people you met and appreciated in the past. Each person can change "the status" multiple times, depending on circumstances. However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out. And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics". We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked.
    - prmoustache 2y ago
      > People you met and appreciated in the past evolve into friends and friends evolve into people you met and appreciated in the past. Each person can change "the status" multiple times, depending on circumstances. Agree with that. > However, if you decide that weaker relationships dont matter, they will never grow into friendships. They will die out. I don't think putting thumbs up on social media posts count as "growing into friendship". > And to large extend that is what is happening with "loneliness epidemics". I am not even sure a _loneliness epidemics_ exists but if that is true it is mostly self induced and artificial relationship pretense on social medias do not help. Quite the contrary. If you get out of social medias you actually realize your only chance to make relationships is by going outside and meet people that are close to you. And this is how you build relationships that matters and prevent loneliness. > We dont care to keep relationships and see it as negative. Then we dont have relationships and act all shocked. I am an expatriate and moved countries several times. I have lost touch with a lot of my old friends as well as a huge part of my larger family because I don't use facebook and instagram. That doesn't mean I don't have relationships. I made new relationships locally, and am keeping in touch with people who are not in the same country but that are as eager as I am to travel once in a while to see me. OTOH last few years I have called a number of friends who are living abroad or several hours of train/plane/driving away from me at least once a year. Some gave unsolicited apologies and promises that next time they will be the one calling, or that they have plan to visit my area. They never called back, nor visited me and I didn't prioritized them enough to try to visit them either. This year I didn't even try to call them. I just moved them from the _friends_ mental drawer to the _acquaintance_ mental drawer. This is very likely what they passively did 2 years ago already while I was still actively trying to stay in touch. If for some reason I travel close enough to their last known place, I may try to contact them but it is very likely that I may never see most of them. But I don't need to follow what they are posting on social medias nor publish stuff I am living and pretend that I or they care because really we do not, or not enough for it to matter.
ozim 2y ago
You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away and most likely have no place in our lives.(by far away I mean you don’t actually get to talk or meet with them or even chat by messanger or so, even if they could live in the same city - I have friends who live far away but we actually meet at least once a year and chat once a week we are far in distance but not far in contact) I would argue that there is much to miss on by wasting time looking up Jenny from primary school when you have your kids, friends and family who you meet day to day. There is actually an option to run into mental health issues that we know social media is causing.
- standardUser 2y ago
  > You write like somehow there would be something to miss out on by not valuing keeping up with people who are far away... Yes, absolutely. The paths our lives take can lead us to have more in common with someone we knew in the past then when we first knew them. And there's a lot of value in having a history with someone, compared to getting to know someone new from scratch. Maintaining loose contact takes virtually no effort but can lead to meaningful interactions down the road.
  - johannes1234321 2y ago
    Yes, I have a few very good remote friends which I meet only rarely, but when it's one of the best kind of things. However most of my "Facebook friends" were shallow faint contacts, where paths may have been close for a while but went apart as each went on with their lives. No more scrolling through which bar they visited, how their kids are doing, or which TV show they were watching didn't take anything from my life, while it encouraged me to reach out more actively to people I really care about, as I didn't "rely" on passive information anymore, assuming to hear about "relevant" events, but became interested in them and shared things which wouldn't make "public" social media.
    - ozim 2y ago
      I think I would add that: if I would be posting stuff and then someone who was an acquaintance only - would hit up a conversation about my wedding photos from 5 years ago how he remembers all were great, or would go with conversation about tv show I just added on my profile. I would not feel comfortable, to say the least, I would feel creeped out. I would start thinking what kind of MLM he joined or if he looks to borrow money as last resort as no one closer would lend him any. If that would be my close friend that would be OK.
Barrin92 2y ago
>you're liable to miss a lot of potential connections. are you really? If you only notice that it's Bob's birthday because you get a FB reminder and the only form of communication is a post on their timeline once a year that's not a connection, that's like talking to your neighbor about the weather out of courtesy because it's awkward to say nothing at all. The reason a lot of people miss out on life nowadays is not because they have too few connections but because they waste their time on fake ones. Life's short, instead of trying to warm up some high school friendship that's going nowhere, focus everything you have on the few people around you that matter. Cutting connections is as valuable a skill as making them, and an increasingly lost art.
- calvinmorrison 2y ago
  Free for 8 years-ish. Yeah. its hard to look people up. Oh im in this town, yeah wonder what happened to xyz, no chance of finding them or shooting them a message. FB connections are so low key and keeping people around makes them easier to find and stay in touch with, IMO. But there's also lots of upsides. I guess I dont know one way or the other.

pmarreck 2y ago

> a call from them um... will someone else tell him/her, or should I?

prmoustache 2y ago
My partner (who's family is living 10000km away on another side of an ocean) learned her estranged father died a few days ago and that he had been terminally ill for months. Apparently someone from that part of the family had posted it on facebook but she didn't notice it as she do not visit it every day.
- pmarreck 2y ago
  People are lazy, and the winning solution (like it or not) is apparently the one that most people default to when they are lazy. For most people, that is arguably currently Facebook.

slg 2y ago

>if you mattered, you would've gotten a direct message or call from them. That ignores the asymmetry of a lot of life events. For example, if a parent died, I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them, I would have more important stuff on my mind. I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. And if someone doesn't reach out, it will hurt the relationship a little even if I'm not conscience of it because when I think of people who were there for me during a tough time, the friend who never knew my parent died wouldn't come to mind.

vFunct 2y ago
Indeed and in the olden times a lot of these life events would have been announced in the local newspaper. But these days, I don’t even know where to even buy a newspaper, let alone make sure everyone is reading it and keeping up with local news. So social media it is, which sucks because they’re extremely edited and filtered out by the algorithm.
- nradov 2y ago
  On Facebook at least, the algorithm is heavily tuned to prioritize major life events: births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc. Occasionally those posts get filtered out but usually they do get prioritized near the top of your feed.
- kelnos 2y ago
  For the people who you care about, you can contact them directly and set up a time to meet to catch up. Or catch up over text or email. Or start a messaging group with mutual friends and keep each other up to date that way. My feeling is that if you only get updates about someone's life via their blasts on social media, you're not really friends. So why do you need to hear about all that stuff?
  - vFunct 2y ago
    Right. You post it on social media to the exact same reason you would post it in the newspaper. And you would have to understand socialization if you wanted to know why people published life events to the newspaper - births, deaths, graduations, marriages, etc. Not everything in the world is for your bestest friends. It’s OK to not have close friends.

mvdtnz 2y ago

Good thing we have you, hypeatai, telling us who (and who not) we're "supposed" to stay in touch with.

veunes 2y ago

But it’s also nice to know what’s going on in people’s lives without needing a deep connection...

kelnos 2y ago
But why, though? If all you have is a shallow social-media connection with someone, why is it nice to know what's going on in their lives? We have a finite amount of time and energy to maintain connections with people. Even shallow connections eat into that. I'd rather spend that time and energy on deeper connections. And while it's customary to say "but sure, I guess other people have different views on this, so to each their own", I... well, I honestly believe it's unhealthy to obsessively try to maintain all these sorts of shallow connections. I think this is a part of why I read about how so many people are lonely these days and have trouble forming friendships and keeping them going.
- Karrot_Kream 2y ago
  Because sometimes you rekindle relationships that have drifted apart but you still stayed somewhat tethered to thanks to social media. I rekindled a friendship with an old friend when I realized he was visiting the same foreign country as I was. Funny enough his wife is a mutual college friend of ours whom he had lost touch with but only met again after reconnecting on social media. I also reconnected with her through my friend.
  - veunes 2y ago
    Yep! And those little updates can sometimes lead to unexpected and meaningful reconnections, like your story with your friend and his wife.
- veunes 2y ago
  Sometimes, those casual connections can spark something more meaningful down the line or just bring small moments of joy! Like, for instance, seeing an old friend’s travel photos or knowing that you're school friend had a baby

Whatsappsuks 2y ago

Agreed. I also went through it and have found no difficulty with throwing away Facebook, Twitter, etc and sticking to only direct or group messaging. Some people HAVE gone through the "but I said in X group chat" like above, but it was all unimportant life events that they were happy to fill me in on there instead. All major things people told me directly. Just because I quit social media didn't mean I wasn't aware of the death of my dog from a world away within 2 minutes of it happening.

MrOrelliOReilly 2y ago

Yes, agreed. For me, quitting social media went hand in hand with a recognition that I maintained superficial contact with a large number of old friends. My relationship with these people was already “illusory”, or at least unsatisfying. Now my relationships are the product of active work, which I find more valuable, even if it means maintaining contact with a smaller group of close contacts (outside my day to day relationships). It doesn’t mean my relationship with old friends and family has died… we just have a lot more to catch-up about when we talk to each other!