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"It is hard to foster good friendships without face contact. Don't matter what the resolution of your Skype video, it is just not the same."

It's common here to read people claiming that you don't need to go to college when you can learn as much, or more, form the Web. This is true perhaps for book learning but it misses the social aspect. School is not just about filling your head with stuff. It's about meeting new people, having face-to-face discussions, learning to work in teams, learning to be someplace on time and prepared, and so on.

"Another sensitive issue is that a higher proportion of HN-ers are probably introverts. Nothing wrong with that. I am one too. That means it is easier by default to be lonely. But in the long run it also hurts"

Somewhat tangential, but I beseech all of you who help organize, or ven just attend, tech gatherings to help break down the barriers of this introversion.

I'm amazed and disappointed to see so many people go to conferences, spend all their time hanging with co-workers who've also come along, then go home without really meeting any new people.

I appreciate how hard it can be to get out of your comfort zone and push yourself to socialize. Especially since the reaction from many other geeks is often abysmal. (Note to women: Sometimes when guys at a tech conference treat you with disdain or incoherent puzzlement it's because they're sexist jerks. But sometimes, maybe more often, it's because they're simply clueless unsocial oafs.)

Tech gatherings need more ways to break up the default cliques people tend to and promote more intermingling of people who've never met before.

It's a lot harder to make new friends when you're older, too. Most of the people I meet don't really have time to make new friends; they barely keep their old friends in maintenance mode, getting together with them every couple of months for some ancient ritual they've always done together, such as golf. You have lunch or drinks with somebody once a week, and you're in. You know, that's a pretty high level of recognition from them. But it's futile; it's going to take you two years to get to know them at that rate.

As if to make my point, an old friend of mine announced his birthday plans today. He's going to a water park (for his stepdaughter) and a bed and breakfast (for his wife.) The rest of us? Nothing. No party, no dinner and drinks, nothing. He's living in a new city and has nobody close by except family, but he's got friends wanting to come from out of town to see him. One is me; another is our best friend from high school, whom he hasn't seen in over a year. So, maybe some other weekend, he says. Fuck that; I know that song. It'll never happen. I'd write him off as an asshole and a lost cause if that wasn't typical for the married guys I know. Should I even bother with "friends" like that, or should I forget about him and call him again when his kids are out of the house?

> It is hard to foster good friendships without face contact. Don't matter what the resolution of your Skype video, it is just not the same.

I haven't entirely found this to be the case, though it's different. I'd say my closest friends are about halfway split between people I mainly talk to online and people I mainly talk to face-to-face. With a handful of people I do both frequently, but with some people one or the other feels more acquaintancey--- there are people I'm good friends with IRL who I only exchange matter-of-fact type of information with online (locations, phone numbers, times of events, etc.), and people I'm good friends with online where hanging out IRL feels really weird and acquaintancey (get a beer and talk about the weather or something).

Textual communication with someone who's also fluent in it feels to me like speaking another language; has a different set of strengths/weaknesses, cadences, emotional cues, etc. than spoken English does. The fluency is important, though: maintaining a text-chat-based friendship with people who didn't grow up on BBSs or something similar is much harder in my experience.

I didn't move the whole time I was growing up and had the same friends the whole first part of my life before college and a simliar thing is happening right now with us going down the path of becoming strangers. However, I do think that sometimes a person does need to go out make new friends. I just don't have anything in common with my old friends from high school. For better or worse they are going down a different path. I really resonate with this article though and thoroughly believe I need close friendships to be happy, but I do not think that one should hold onto old friendships, especially ones from high school that you were likely forced into, at all costs.