Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Osmium | Hacker News Reader

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> For the most part, I find that most online social media just degrades human interaction. Twitter encourages short shallow quips, Facebook shows me my friends arguing angrily and pointlessly over random articles, dating apps encourage some of the behaviors described in the article. Heck, even HN encourages a certain kind of attitude that I don't find that great, all in all.

I don't know. I think, perhaps, in the 'real world' we learn to become very good at choosing who we associate with, and don't spend time with 'destructive' people (for lack of a better term), but perhaps this has yet to be learnt properly online.

For myself, I literally have never seen an argument on my Facebook feed. I have about 150 Facebook friends. I don't see flame wars on Twitter; I follow people I find interesting, that's all. I subscribe to subreddits with sane moderation policies. Generally, the internet I encounter on a day-to-day basis is actually quite a civil, friendly place.

I just don't think the online world is that much different from the real world. You choose where to spend your time, who to spend it with, and that shapes the experiences you have–just like the real world. Is it really so different?

I absolutely don't disagree with you. I've tried a more temperate approach like the one you describe; and I can get it with some degree of success for a while, but it never lasts long. Hence why I'm a bit more aggressive in my approach now.

I'm glad it's working for you though!

I thought I agreed with you about 'cheaping of human communication' until a couple of years ago. I believed that Snapchat was the worst thing to happen to human communication, and somehow that human interactions had been fundamentally changed for the worse.

Then last year, I went on a 2-month long backpacking trip. I don't have facebook et al. and blogs are too tiring, so I decided to get snapchat just for the trip. A year later, I've gotten ~20 people to join snapchat, just to keep in touch with me. : )

For me, it's the model of human communication that matters: I don't necessarily want you to remember exactly what I said to you 12.27465 years ago. I know most of the HN and Reddit crowd aspire for the perfect object Vulcan mind, with perfect recollection either, but for me, the value of interpersonal communication lies in the fact that it's REALLY fallible. Not only do we NOT remember things as they are, even if we do remember something right, the act of remembering it messes up the actual memory. For me, that's essential. Our social interactions haven't evolved to reflect a perfect recollection but to accommodate our limitations. We are imperfect, and I like my mode of communication to reflect that.

Can you ellaborate on what, in specific, made you change your mind about snapchat and the rest of that kind of communication?

I left facebook because it was too tiring. I HAD to have SOME way of connecting with friends. The part I like about snapchat the most is that there's no history -- you send an image, and it's gone, so there's no particular 'baggage' associated with it: no long thread of comments, no 'history' to look at, no tedious 'you didn't like my comment/omg i got 300 likes'. For me, snapchat is somewhere between real-life interaction and texting: as ephemeral as real life 'talk' and long-distance as well... a text message. On other media, stupid things people (or you) say tend to stay around forever, in snapchat, your mistakes last as long as the snaps do. A bad pun, or a mistimed joke, for example... they don't hurt you like they do in other media.

This may sound like exaggeration, but snapchat could be the social network for adults in the longer term [not the 'look at my kid' kind, but 'we're having fun, but don't want it too seem like we're bragging' kind.

The medium always shapes the conversation. So yeah it's different from the real world. Maybe you don't see flame wars on Twitter. But do you ever see in depth discussions? Long form story telling? Even 2 way discussions are rare, though they are possible. Twitter is optimized for the quick joke, the announcement, and the reaction comment.

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