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Comment by glitcher | Hacker News Reader

> When Facebook was getting going, I had these people who would come up to me and they would say, 'I'm not on social media.' And I would say, 'OK. You know, you will be.'

I think the tide has been steadily turning on this. I never did use social media beyond creating an account for work or curiosity, quickly getting bored and abandoning. Sure there may have been a time where I felt a little less connected, but those feelings have diminished over time.

The "workarounds" available for those not on social networking are abundant, and more importantly to me, much simpler and time effective for me to use.

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> I never did use social media

Yet here you are posting on HN.

As someone who "left" social media I still frequently feel a void from it. Recently I moved back to my hometown and realized I had completely lost touch with anyone I knew in high school. Different phone, didn't port contacts. I know they all live nearby but I feel like I lost them forever.

The bottom line is there is no connection.

Before social media, those are people we forgot about and moved on from. And for good reason.

Social media, especially Facebook, seems engineered to create this illusion that we're more connected with our "friends"; while those people may have been our friends in another time, that doesn't mean they're our friends now just because we have Facebook connections with them. If it only takes not having a Facebook profile to not exist to people, they're not really our friends to begin with. I can say this about the vast majority of people who are my "friends" on Facebook; I know for sure that 99% of them will never contact me unless Facebook prods them to post "Happy Birthday" on my timeline. This isn't to say that my connections are bad people, but it's to say that social media has distorted what friendship and human bonding actually mean in order to profit on peoples' loneliness.

It's not difficult for a truly lonely person to come to that conclusion, but that perspective solidified in me when I became real-life friends with a neighbor of mine. It had been several years since I made a non-superficial friendship. And no social medium was required. I was reminded that real friends are actually interested in seeing you, talking to you, and coming to you first when they've got news about something. Just one friend like that is far more valuable than all the "friends" I ever had on Facebook.

You may still feel a void from it, but I do hope you eventually make some real-life connections like I have and forget about your old "friends" entirely. I abstained from Facebook for 9 months, and even near the end I was feeling the void. Going back to it was starkly different and I realized how much of a waste of time it is. I do still use Facebook, but only as a photo repository since I do have some semblance of friends and family on there. Though I'm sure they wouldn't bother with me if I wasn't there to bolster their friend-count.

> Beadie: All the guys at the bar, Jimmy, all the girls; they don't show up at your wake. Not because they don't like you. But because, they never knew your last name. Then a month later, someone tells them, "Oh, Jimmy died." "Jimmy who?" "Jimmy the Cop." "Ohhh," they say, "him". And all the people on the job, all those people you spent all the hours in the radio cars with, the guys with their feet up on the desk, tellin' stories, who shorted you on your food runs, who signed your overtime slips. In the end, they're not gonna be there either. Family, that's it. Family, and if you're lucky, one or two friends who are the same as family. That's all the best of us get. Everything else is just...

-- The Wire

Is that really so bad? You moved away so they were no longer in your life. Now you have the opportunity to run into them at a reunion or a bar and authentically catch up. Alternatively, you could have both been passively observing eachother's lives online, and you'd have nothing to talk about.

People have always lost touch. Before and after Facebook. By the way, being "friends" on Facebook does not equal being in touch; it signifies nothing.

But your experience is just anecdotal yes? You (and frankly me as well) have a resistance to the FB addiction, but the numbers of people on the platform are staggering and cannot be ignored.

And China has their own version of FB, what will that be used for in the hands of a totalitarian government?

Staggering numbers, yes, but what percentage of its users suffer from a sort of social media addiction? Or are even active beyond checking in now and then.

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