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Comment by akater | Hacker News Reader

For a non-technical text about a basic, broadly-appealing topic, this has disappointingly high level of mentions of something called “FaceTime”.

I have not yet read it all but I already have doubts it's worth reading further after second mention if author just expects all readers to be on Facebook or be familiar with a particular program to connect to others, or with an experience of usage thereof.

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I'm sorry you're disappointed by the fact that I said "FaceTime" three times in a 6000 word essay about connection with oneself.

The essay is not predicated on you using Facebook, having an iPhone, using FaceTime, Zoom, or any specific program, but I think that'd be pretty clear to you if you read it before commenting.

If you are still skeptical about reading it, this twitter thread has thoughts and reviews of dozens of people who have actually read it: https://twitter.com/ankitshah/status/1264982479489732608

FaceTime is not a complicated concept. It’s a phone call but with video. I’m sure you already know this, even if you’re pretending not to (to look “cool” I guess). If the author explained every single word used, he’d be writing a dictionary and not an article.

There may be different aspects to programs like this. They may provide calls, they may provide some other features that are significant to understand their influence on users but non-obvious to non-users.

I never encountered FaceTime and I have avoided Facebook since I firnt saw it. Also, curiously, I've recently observed a group of like-minded people divided, in a fairly confrontational manner, unable to listen to each other, with one side being, according to my observanions, overrepresented on Facebook, compared to another, and the other overrepresented on Twitter.

This can be attributed to “echo chamber” phenomenon, or to platform preference by leaders of opinions. But my null hypothesis now is, Facebook actually changes its users to being worse communicators, unlike Twitter, and it contributes to users' feelings of isolation, significantly. I'm sure details of means of communication matter.

FaceTime is not a Facebook product. It's also bad form to accuse others of being poor communicators while ignoring all obvious social cues to continue on with a preformed rant against an unrelated entity to the topic at hand.

Most of your points in this post apply directly to your own previous post.

I think you might gain something from this article for its actual content. If it helps, replace Facebook/Twitter with Hacker News and FaceTime with whatever video or phone calls you use. Or engage in some suspension of disbelief to get to the real point. The author talks about ways of really connecting with people.

Your computer can help you look up the definitions of words you don't understand.

e.g. in FireFox, double click to select the word, then right click and there is "search DuckDuckGo for 'word'" in the menu. Dictionary extensions are available for in-browser definitions, and searching DuckDuckGo or Google for "define:word" will usually bring up a definition in the search results page, or if not then in the top few result links.

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