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>If your best friend died, would you really know how to contact everyone he/she was friends with?

If my best friend died I would be notified immediately by at least three people. If I weren't (I would be) I would know something was wrong as soon as he stopped responding to my text messages/calls.

That's because we're actual friends and are actually involved in each other's lives. His wife knows me, his mother and father know me, his children know me. The people you're describing are not in any way best friends.

I didn't say everyone you were friends with are "best" friends. Nor am I trying to redefine friendship as "Facebook friends." And I wish people would read what I wrote, not what they think about Facebook.

>I didn't say everyone you were friends with are "best" friends.

Where did I imply that? I literally responded to:

>If your best friend died, would you really know how to contact everyone he/she was friends with?

>Nor am I trying to redefine friendship as "Facebook friends." And I wish people would read what I wrote, not what they think about Facebook.

Yeah, didn't say that either. I wish people would read what I wrote too.

It's just absolutely 99% ridiculous to believe that _facebook_ would be the way you'd likely be notified that your "best friend" (your words) died. A true friend, let alone a _best_ friend, is someone whose life you're involved in at a deeper level than FB.

I left 1% for situations like elderly people who have been friends for decades and live half a world away from each other.

Look at the question you originally quoted:

> If your best friend died, would you really know how to contact everyone he/she was friends with?

How did you make the leap to:

> It's just absolutely 99% ridiculous to believe that _facebook_ would be the way you'd likely be notified that your "best friend" (your words) died.

I didn't say: "I want to find out my best friend died via Facebook." My question was meant to imply: "I don't know how to find everyone my best friend considers his friends, but his Facebook friends list is an improper superset of that list"

> But you're ignoring the fact that Facebook is effectively the first opportunity in history for a universal "push" mechanism for friendship.

Only because it has defined downwards the entire concept of friendship.

I don't disagree that it has redefined "friendship" in a negative way, but that's irrelevant.

How would all of your genuine friends find out you've died, if they are widely dispersed and to various degrees ignorant of each other?

The same way they did before social media became a thing, presumably. More pertinent is how you can now have a what’s considered a genuine friendship entirely by interacting with someone on fb.

No it hasn't. You don't have to accept anybody as a friend on Facebook.

The way you've framed the situation, IMHO, really speaks to the difficulty of FB trying to find a universal usecase that is applicable or satisfactory to everyone and to every kind of social relationship.

You posit that FB could be the "most effective way in the history of mankind to tell everyone who knew someone that person has passed on". Sure, but why stop at death? FB could also be the most effective way to tell every mutual friend when your best friend:

- Has a child

- Gets married

- Gets a new job

- Has a death in the family

- Loses their job

- Gets divorced

- Seems to be depressed right now.

The fact that FB has been highly-effective push notification has been key to its success but also one of the things that sometimes bothers people when it comes to privacy and other issues. You might argue that death presents a special case -- and I would generally agree -- but I would most definitely argue that significant parts of FB's userbase (which consists of basically every country and subculture) would disagree. FB's tweaking of things so that death is pushed as a priority would not make everyone happy, and every tweak means that something else gets untweaked, of course.

That said, it's worth pointing out that FB has recognized its potential to be a new kind of obituary/memorial service, and all of the complications and downsides of that. Here's a pretty good whitepaper on the difficulties: https://research.fb.com/publications/legacy-contact-designin...

I haven't been on FB for most of the past decade. I regularly ask friends, "Oh, did you see so-and-so got married?"

Inevitably, they know that because they are FB friends, but really met through me.

I wonder if we lose something because the connection between Person A-B-C is weakened. Person C is presented info by Facebook, instead of through the original connection. Denies neurons a chance to fire together and cross-associate.

IMHO, this sounds like you're jealous that your friends A and C have a way of communicating (and keeping apprised of each others' situations better than you're able) that bypasses you. It's your choice to remain uninvolved (and I actually respect that quite a lot), but you can't reasonably be annoyed that others who are involved in it bypass you.

I don't think this is the case, but I can see how it's an appealing interpretation. I do experience a brief moment of annoyance, but it feels more like an annoyance that we lost an opportunity to reminisce and re-connect over a mutual friend. The call and response of "did you see this?" and "Yes." stops the conversation more than if they respond with "no", and we can relate over a story.

I sometimes worry that, after doing everything I can while living to avoid using Facebook and/or supporting their business model in any way, someone might throw that all away on my behalf if something were to happen to me.

I'd see an announcement of my death on Facebook as an insult, as my death would essentially be creating engagement/ad impressions/clicks for Facebook.

Then don't have someone tell Facebook you died. Nobody would know if you don't think they shouldn't know.

It would be kind of hard to prevent people from posting something about my death on Facebook, unless I figured out a some way to temporarily re-animate myself.

I know a lot of people. Many of those people unfortunately use Facebook. There's a good chance that at least one of them will be posting something about it, regardless of my wishes.

> I'd see an announcement of my death on Facebook as an insult, as my death would essentially be creating engagement/ad impressions/clicks for Facebook.

That's an odd way of seeing it considering that paid obituaries, in Newspapers, have been a thing for quite a while. The family pays the newspaper for the obituary, the newspaper sells advertisement space and then even asks people to pay for that whole package.

Compared to that, the Facebook version at least feels only like half a rip-off because your family wouldn't have to pay for it being posted and others wouldn't have to pay to read it.

Hmmm... I like your point but disagree a bit. The obituary thing, is something from the past, from a time where advertisement was not that pervasive. Also, it's not much used anymore (at least in my country). So I'd say the obituary in newspaper is not quite comparable to FB. FB is based on advertisement and on social information commercial exploitation. So I'd consider an obituary on FB to be more of a problem than on newspaper.

But, I suppose that if I die today, someone will post something on facebook (statistically, at least one of the person I know should use it for that; although I totally condemn FB (FB, not the social network thing))

> Also, it's not much used anymore (at least in my country).

In Germany, at least, they are still very popular. Working at an ambulant palliative service, one of my colleagues checks the local newspapers each morning, over the years it's happened quite a few times that we found out about one of our patients passing away from the obituary in the newspaper before we got a notice from the family or the acting physician.

> FB is based on advertisement and on social information commercial exploitation.

So are pretty much the majority of newspapers at this point, just because Facebook is better at the social information exploitation angle doesn't turn them into an entirely different beast, as I'm pretty sure newspapers are equally busy trying to categorize their customers for better ad impressions, their databases just ain't remotely as big and detailed as those of Facebook.

From a practical perspective, I'd still prefer a free obituary to a paid one anytime. Sure, it might not be completely free, as you are paying with personal information, it's at least more free than "Pay for the obituary, pay for the newspaper and then still look at advertisements".

The best solution would probably something like Facebook that doesn't finance itself through the commercialization of its user's data. I wonder how viable an approach like the original WhatsApp one (subscription services with very small fees) would work for a social media platform at the scale of Facebook?

> But you're ignoring the fact that Facebook is effectively the first opportunity in history for a universal "push" mechanism for friendship.

Not really. Actual "social networks" have done that for millenia. They even include a much smarter filtering system than Facebook's: unimportant information dies out quickly, and people are told or not told about events based on human judgment. Ah, well... this is what we have now.

I don't think we had friends halfway across the globe back then. And if you did, you might not hear about them dying for months.

We can now build social "networks" which are much less locality based, and where your friends aren't necessarily friends with each other. And that's good.

It does mean that you've got less redundancy in the system though. Which is why it's not unreasonable to use new tools like facebook to keep up to date with people.

I can’t imagine a group of people and less trust and want to manage my relationships at that level than the people who run Facebook. If I’m being honest I can’t think of a third-party I’d like to relegate that responsibility to, not that I think it should be relegated, it is after all central to the process of maintaining friendships. Maybe the “friendship“ people think they have online is something other than what is traditionally been thought of as friendship.

When you die, how effective are you going to be at telling everyone you consider your friends that you've passed on?

Do you have an email list right now that someone could use to share that news and hit 100% of your friends?

The nature of "Facebook friendship" as it pertains to real friendship is orthogonal and irrelevant to this question: in a world where genuine friendship spans continents and social circles, how do you notify everyone who cares that someone has died?

The people who matter would know because they are involved in your life. Everyone else is just someone you used to know. Let's not up and change the definition of 'friend' to someone you haven't seen or spoken to personally in years but resides in your FB friends list.

My definition of friendship includes people I haven't interacted with in years, and that definition long predates my involvement with Facebook.

Most of my friends aren't actually "friends" on Facebook.

Anyway, it's clear that people are thinking I'm an advocate for the Facebook definition of friendship, which is in no way what I wrote, but whatever.

When you die, how effective are you going to be at telling everyone you consider your friends that you've passed on? Do you have an email list right now that someone could use to share that news and hit 100% of your friends?

Yes, and my next of kin has a clearly written set of instructions to follow in that event. Plus I don’t have hundreds of “friends” defined by algorithms, just friends who would rapidly miss me and inquire as to why I vanished. It’s the kind of thing you consider when dealing with actual people, and not just text you’ve read to yourself and attributed to a set of imaginings you call your “FB Friend” and which may or may not bear any particular relationship to the real person.