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Comment by tempestn | Hacker News Reader

It feels somehow significant that the Facebook reply ended up being its own message in a bottle.

Savage. But accurate. We should start making articles about that. Person checks their nested nested spam, other inbox on Facebook and finds endearing highly relevant message from the turn of the decade.

I’d bet almost everyone who uses Instagram and/or Facebook has stories like that. It’s crazy how poor of a UX choice it is, and I imagine Facebook did it this way only because they’re so bad at spam prevention.

I have no use for LinkedIn generally (at least not now) but I've had an account for years with links to some old acquaintances I don't really care to be associated with anymore, due to several industry, geographical, and social changes. I checked it on a whim about a year ago and found an old message from someone I hadn't talked to in over 7 years, very professional message just trying to catch up. I have no other social media accounts and am not easily found through general searches, so it was the only way this person could reach me.

I felt horrible for weeks that I had never responded, then I sent off a reply. I then promptly forgot that I did so, and abandoned LinkedIn for another year. I checked again last week for some reason and I had a year-old response to my response. I forgot to reply and only just now remembered this situation.

I'm now trying to decide if I should bother responding and risk another long delay, or pretend I'm dead.

Been pretending I'm dead to linkedin for years and feeling pretty good about it, for anecdata.

Nah just reply back. That shit makes my day. If I wanted to talk you all the time I'd ask for your phone number.

do you want to talk to the person?

then just explain that you don't use linkedin actively, and go from there. if they are not bothered by that they will reply. then possibly offer to switch to a different medium like email that you are less likely to miss.

We are in covid times, people will understand.

Don't remind me of it. I missed some important messages because of that stupid feature back when I used Facebook.

Yep me too. I still feel sad about it sometimes.

Years ago when I was a regular Facebook user, there was a language setting called "English (pirate)" that would turn your inbox into a "Bottle o’ messages". Not sure if it's still an option but I quite enjoyed it :)

https://reface.me/hacks/make-facebook-talk-like-a-pirate/

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