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Comment by eyeareque | Hacker News Reader

After ditichong Facebook long ago it seems amusing to me that people have such a connection with it and find it hard to leave.

Sure it may seem hard at first. But your true friends will not lose contact with you. You might not know random life events about your seldom communicated with old high school peers though.

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I'm not sure I can imagine the perspective of the generation that has grown up with social media for their entire memory. I was in my mid to late twenties before having a mobile phone began to become a routine thing. I myself didn't have one until I was in my thirties. I have always lived in a world without Facebook, because I never started using it. I seem to get along just fine. Not sure what all the fuss is about.

Those kids these days with their new fangled gadgets and social media. In my day we walked two miles uphill each way to share pictures of cats with our friends.

I'm confused about why you're dismissive of this person pointing out a very real and interesting situation...not a unique one, but intergenerational gaps in beliefs/lifestyle/socialization/etc is a pretty fundamental challenge throughout the modern world, and the gap caused by iphone/facebook/whatever is a particularly concerning and current one.

No need to be dismissive. I'm in my early 20s, and most of my life has seen the use of social media as the core mode of communication. Can you imagine moving back to a world where you could only talk to friends in person after you'd experienced talking to friends over the phone? Or shifting back to phone calls only after you'd gotten used to text messages? Like it or not, a paradigm shift has occurred. Personally I think Facebook has gone too far: they've manipulated people too much, and their platform has become mostly useless for its core feature (social interaction) because they've put too much work into monetization, ads, algorithms, and suggested content.

I think there's a lot to be said for what is effectively a collection of personal websites where people can share their life events along with a standardized communication protocol. There are a lot of advantages, like being able to keep up with (slightly) more people and being able to stay in contact with people who live farther away, and who you don't have the money or time to visit in person regularly. But it has to be on a platform that values those things, or it'll go the way of Facebook -- exploitative, and eventually useless.

The GP was talking about not understanding what all the fuss is about with kids these days and their phones and social media and I'm the one being dismissive? Your comment makes more sense under the GP, not me.

I guess it's about the dopamine rush of the always flowing new content and never ending notifications.

I upvoted you. What gets down voted on HN no longer makes sense to me. You make a really good point alluding to the direction our society is heading. I think a world where everything is digital and behind a "veil" of keyboard and monitors is a dangerous one. We need to make sure we don't lose touch with the reality that is the physical world so we don't live 100% online. All I see these days are groups of teenagers standing together looking at their phones...it's fucking terrible.

How will I know if my college roommates got fat though?

In my case there it's not a problem with a good friends, but that I will lose access to some interesting people, who publish/discuss interesting topics on FB.

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