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Comment by wincy | Hacker News Reader

Similar experience for me and it’s just been replaced with… nothing. My gaming buddies talk on Discord but I just don’t really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore. It’d be a hassle to even figure out how to contact them. Only 13 people showed up to my high school reunion last year from a graduating class of ~400.

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It’s returned to nothing. Losing touch with people you didn’t contact regularly was the norm until the mid 2000s.

For someone who grew up in the ‘golden years’ of social media, it’s kinda weird to see.

The thing is, before social media, we did have a culture of periodically reaching out and calling people. Those muscles completely atrophied though, so when we fall off social media, the result is even less connection than we had before Facebook et al existed.

It just keeps tumblring down, tumblring down, tumblring down. I just keep logging me out, logging me out, logging me out.

I joke, but the internet I knew as a youth going the way of the dinosaurs really has had a deep impact on me. End of an epoch.

Exactly.. you’d only really see them on Christmas or Easter.. Maybe some special event like Wedding.

Once in a while they would come over but that was it. You never knew what your uncle had for lunch.

"…I just don’t really hear from my aunts and uncles and cousins anymore…"

Yeah, actually why I left Facebook a decade ago: finding out what horrible people my relatives were.

This applies to “friends” also. And discovering how many of them are actual idiots. Oh, these people can’t put 5 words together to form a coherent sentence and their spelling grammar suck to top it off? I don’t miss it at all.

Same. Idk how college communication work now; we had class groups and planned everything over FB events/pages back then.

For friends, I started a few text group chats to stay in touch. It's really annoying because someone has Android and RCS is broken on someone's end. Some also use FB Messenger, but nobody 2 years younger or older than me is on that.

When I finished my undergrad a few years ago, we were relying heavily on GroupMe chats, with the occasional Slack and one or two LinkedIn groups mixed in. Discord was just starting to exit the gaming sphere and hit the mainstream though. I'm willing to bet it's absolutely dominating the space now.

How long ago was that if you don't mind me asking? I was in college 2014-2016, and GroupMe existed but was on its way out. I asked our college interns around 2022 what people use for class groups, and I think they weren't sure what I even meant, but the answer wasn't Discord.

2019-23.

It's worth noting that GroupMe sticking around was honestly probably a byproduct of my own circles and the specific campus culture to a certain extent.

> I started a few text group chats to stay in touch.

This is the space that WhatsApp fills, for better or worse.

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