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Comment by mquander | Hacker News Reader

For example Hangouts makes me lose at least half a hour of productity a day but if I uninstalled it and never checked it then I would never talk to all of my friends on Hangouts which is not a trade-off that I am willing to take.

A lot of people say this one (usually about Facebook), but I don't understand it. If you want to talk to those friends, why doesn't it suffice to schedule spending time with them in the same way you would have done it in 2000?

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I don't know about your age but in 2000 I was in middle school and all my friends communicated by aim since we didn't have the ability to go where we wanted when we wanted. That social structure has carried over into adult life where I have several close friends that I get to see maybe twice a year due to our schedules, but can still talk to them everyday. Dropping communication through messaging apps would probably mean we just aren't friends anymore. The barriers to us meeting up more often aren't just laziness

Yeah, actually I'm the same age as you and I did most of my talking over IM too then, so my comment was poorly made. The spirit of my comment was "in a way you could have done it in 2000, whichever you prefer", e.g. email, phone, in-person, scheduling time to be online together. I use all of those to keep in touch with people now as an adult.

Ah yea, I agree then. I use Hangouts in my circle of friends because it's currently the most convenient, but we've changed what we've used before and can change again

It is just a guess, but maybe they are not on IRC or MUD anymore. Or started families and they don't live in the same dorm anymore.

Exactly. And not just 2000, Hangouts was released in 2013, are these friendships less than four years old?

Phones and email still exist. If your relationship is predicated on a single internet based communication service then it's probably not a relationship worth maintaining.

Just use a different communication mechanism. It's really not that hard.

Send a postcard, it's fun, I promise.

For me, it's actually about having additional communication that didn't exist before Hangouts came out. My family is spread around the country and hardly visits or calls each other. With Hangouts, we suddenly started communicating more, and that's not something I want to revert.

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