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>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

• 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.
• skeeter2020 2y ago
  >> For example, if a parent died... and yet people died quite often before social media; what did we do then? If the realtionship is built upon the foundation of social media, it's actually not that strong, absent social media. We'll be fine.
  • Kerrick 2y ago
    Obituaries were published in newspapers. The news spread to local strangers, not just friends of friends of the deceased.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • jhbadger 2y ago
      They still are. The issue is not many people read newspapers (whether paper or online) these days.
  • s1artibartfast 2y ago
    you would find out at church or any number of the 3rd places you shared. Yes, that may have been better, but that doesn't mean deleting social media automatically sends you back in time. Doubly so if all of your friends are still on social media and using it as the primary form of communication. Imagine deleting your email and telephone in 1999 and saying "if they were really my friend, they would drive/fly to my house and talk to me".
    • labster 2y ago
      In 1999 we had obits and mail, just like in 1899. Of course now all of the newspapers are gone (what’s black and white and dead all over?), so notifying the local community is much harder than 25 years ago. Also some people back then would brag about not having a TV, the same way vegans still do today.
      • Intermernet 2y ago
• anxoo 2y ago
  also in the old days, your friend bob would have told cory, "hey, did you hear alice's dad died? we should all go out for drinks". but we live in the bowling alone era, where we're increasingly isolated. quitting social media is not, on its own, going to fix your social life. and being on social media can make you more connected, or more miserable. the responsibility is yours
  • jahsome 2y ago
    I'm a firm believer being loosely connected to so many people isn't the fix many seem to think it is. I find shallow connections, which is about all social media can support IMO, are worthless at best and detrimental at worst. YMMV, but my quality of life increased in ways I can't even begin to describe by severing all the dozens or perhaps hundreds of shallow connections social media was encouraging me to cling to. With the saved time and energy, I've been able to cultivate far fewer-- but much deeper and more (mutually) fulfilling-- connections with those who are _actually_ important.
    • JavierFlores09 2y ago
      This kind of comment always makes me wonder, are the people doing this doing well financially to afford cutting off all those "loose" connections with people like that? Because I couldn't imagine just destroying these relationships for no reason when I myself have benefited vastly from keeping them alive, even if barely communicating at all with these people. I think this advice is generally harmful to networking as someone grows, which is vital in today's society
      • kelnos 2y ago
        I don't think this discussion is about professional networking. It's about personal and social connections. If quitting Facebook makes you un-/under-employed then I think you're Doing Life Wrong. GP mentions "severing" those connections, but I think that's even too strong a phrasing. There wasn't really anything there in the first place, so there wasn't anything to sever. Simply not reading someone else's social media posts anymore, when you didn't really interact with them outside Facebook (or for some people even inside Facebook) isn't really severing anything.
• kelnos 2y ago
  My mother died when I was in college, before social media was a thing. I told a few closer friends about it, and asked them to spread the news and to tell others that I didn't really want to talk about it. I was missing a few weeks of the semester because of it, and knew that people would ask me where I'd been once I was back, and knew I wouldn't have the emotional bandwidth to tell everyone the story over and over and over, and accept their condolences gracefully. It makes me really sad if it's true that people assume that when they post big, difficult stuff like that on social media, anyone who doesn't see it doesn't care about them. Even for people who are active on social media, the feed and post promotion algorithms make it fairly likely that a decent chunk of people who really should see that post might not see it.
• austin-cheney 2y ago
  > 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. That seems so bizarre. Just 20+ years ago this sort of sympathy seeking broadcasting action was associated with mental health illness, like Munchausen Biproxy. Yes, back in the day if tragedy happened people would take deliberate effort to call each other.
  • Mashimo 2y ago
    20+ years ago you would have put it in the local news paper.
    • manuelmoreale 2y ago
      And that is still a thing where I live here in Italy.
    • 0xEF 2y ago
      Most of us would not have even done that, though yes, the option was there, but that sort of thing was much more popular 40+ years ago. There was another discussion where this came up on HN recently, but people get quite emotionally defensive when you start scrutinizing their reasons for staying on social media, so it is hard to have an honest conversation about it without a bunch of hyperbolic takes. In my experience, it was designed to be addictive, partly by using our own behavior against us and partly by vindicating the desire for attention. The idea that we need to be sharing every aspect of our personal narrative with the world is problematic, as it turns out, but we are so steeped in it that's there's no chance of purifying those waters, again. To your point, yes, there was some aspect of this back in the day, what with obituaries in newspapers being out there to both acknowledge that a person lived, but also put out the call to any old acquaintances to come say goodbye, but it was a laughable effort by today's standards of maximum self-aggrandizing and competitive social engagement. We have to ask ourselves if that is a socially and mentally healthy position to be in, which is an admittedly scary question.
      • Mashimo 2y ago
• spacechild1 2y ago
  > I might post it on social media and then the onus is on other people to reach out to me. Nobody can expect that everyone is on social media, let alone a specific platform. You typically tell your family and some close friends and they will spread the word.
• herbst 2y ago
  If someone literally thinks it's going to hurt our relationship that I am not following their facebook nonsense I am totally happy to not have them as friend anymore
• Arch-TK 2y ago
  When my father died, the last thing on my mind was trying to tell as many people as possible. I didn't (and still don't) have any social media accounts so that was out of the question but I didn't tell almost anyone for a long time until it came up in conversation.
• flakeoil 2y ago
  It must be quite common sense to actively contact the people you know were friends or family to your parents. Not necessarily by phone unless you also know them well, but by email or text or whatever contact details your parents have in their contact book. I very much would think your parents would expect that of their children. >I'm not going to call everyone in my life to tell them It's particularly the people in your parents life you should inform, not necessarily the people in your life. Don't forget that your social media network is not the same as your parent's social media network (if at all they use it).