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Comment by akeck | Hacker News Reader

An ex-friend and I never signed off. We had an ongoing conversation that died down to only me writing messages, and then I stopped. It's still there in WhatsApp. Frozen in time. (The person is fine and posts public updates on FB and elsewhere.)

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Was it the lack of response that made them an ex-friend?

The lack of multiple responses over an extended period of time seems like as big a hint as you can get.

If you're standing next to someone and they ignore your attempts at getting their attention, how long should you continue before finding something better to do?

In this case it's better to remove that person from the contact list, isn't it? He knows in both cases he is ignored, but if he's removed as a contact then he at least knows he shouldn't send messages in vain.

That seems more extreme than just becoming less than friends. Why tarnish a good rolodex? A contact list isn't a friend list.

Rolodex? What's next, a Filofax?

I think the point of this article is the difference between standing next to someone and online conversations. While I agree that is a major hint, especially in certain cases (especially in the sense of the stalker-esque men hounding women through DMs on social media), I've had very long periods of non-communication with long-distance friends I still consider "close" that pick up much later, sometimes with multiple messages on either side with varying degrees of response.

It just depends on the nature of the message. If one side is just amassing a list of things or a complete idea to digest on the recepient's own time, with the mutual understanding that people lead busy lives, it's a bit different than say, someone repeatedly ignoring a particular request or general attempts to start a live conversation.

This is a natural tendency of text-only conversations.

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