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Comment by aantix | Hacker News Reader

Strength of friendships in Germany can't be granular?

Aren't there just people that have been good to you in the present or past, that you want to see succeed, that you want to root for? Those are the perfect candidates for Facebook.

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I'm generalizing something fierce here, but generally speaking, friendship in Germanic countries is highly non-linear. Either you're friends or you're not. My theory is that it's about geographical mobility. When people move around a lot a sliding scale of friendship makes sense. When you and everyone around you are mostly stationary you know who you want to spend time with and everyone else is just noise. Doesn't really explain the Irish, I think, though I don't know much about their geographical mobility.

The Irish aren't Germanic. There's your explanation.

Well, there's nothing magic about Germanicness. If the Irish move about as much as Germans, then that can't be the (sole) explanation for the difference in niceness to strangers.

German language (or more precisely, idiom) maintains distinct meanings for "mein Freund" versus "Freund von mir," the former being far more intimate.

Acquaintances? FOAFs? Former colleagues? A DJ you used to go see 20 years ago? In the US, all of these people get swept under the rug of "friends" in the FB era, and it's in this way that they are less granular if "friend" can mean just about anybody you've ever come across.

This was none other more apparent in college

See someone from your hallway in your dorm in the library you never spoke to before? Oh dude that's my boy from my dorm right there!

See a classmate out at the bar that you only asked for homework a few times? "Sup dude! It's your boy from chem class!"

And hundreds of other examples similar to this.

> In the US, all of these people get swept under the rug of "friends" in the FB era, and it's in this way that they are less granular if "friend" can mean just about anybody you've ever come across.

"FaceBook friend" maps roughly to "Anyone I have had some form of contact with and either don't actively hate, who says things I'm interested in hearing, or who I haven't gotten around to deleting". It's a completely distinct concept from "friend", in my mind. A FaceBook friend could be more accurately be described as a "contact", the way that I usually see it used.

I know some people who are deep in the FB Kool-Aid, or who label all acquaintances as "friends", but that doesn't accurately describe most of the people around me.

I'm from Romania and we kind of do the same thing as they do.

The people you mention are not friends, they're people you know ("cunoștințe" in Romanian). We might casually call them "friends" occasionally but most people only truly call "friends" a handful of people.

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