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Comment by en3r0 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the problem with online relationships, you can pick them up and drop them whenever you like. You can do that in real life to a degree, but sometimes you are forced to confront friends in real life when you don't want to. A real friend requires surviving a degree of confrontation.

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The OP article talks about people met online who they subsequently met and hung out with in person. To me, this is now an meatspace friendship, so yeah, it's "real".

Pure online relationships where you have never met or seen the other person are in my experience an order of magnitude less "real". As you note, there's no 'skin in the game' and ghosting a relationship is zero effort and likely zero consequences, and when everyone knows this is the case the relationships are equally less consequential.

This is the crucial difference. The online abstraction facilitates behaviors that are destructive to friendship, like ghosting, blocking, or even banning if you have admin powers in their meeting place.

Also, since real life is abstracted online, small issues tend to become dramatic because. It takes courage, and some recklessness, to open yourself to a total stranger that might not even be what they claim to be. For us who saw the initial anonymous wild west of the Web, it's difficult to trust people online. It might be different with younger generations that grew up with having their real identity open in several mainstream places.

I agree. Without seeing someone regularly in person or knowing their body language, mannerisms, quirks etc., I find the relationship to be much more disposable. There are people I was friends with in college that I only keep up with over text and those relationships are much more frail than they used to be.

I've experience that probably in the same ratio with IRL and Online contacts.

Sometimes people just go into different directions, it's sad but it's ok.

I've kept alive some online friendships from the bb forums, that I've met in real life a couple of times.

Similar to friends from HS, college or ex coworker friendships, sometimes interests change, they get into weird values you don't share or mature at a different speed than you. Sometimes it's just a logistics problem, it's hard to keep friends when you have a family, jobs and live in another time zone.

I've been ghosted by IRL friends as bad as with online friends. Outside of an awkward encounter in the mall or something like that, there is no real difference in that regard.

Maybe in isolation, although in most competitive video game spaces (which is where I've met majority of my "online friends") a disagreement between two parties tend to get resolve because it disrupts the entire dynamic.

It is increasingly difficult to just "drop" someone when you friends with their IRL friends, which is also pretty common. You'll play a game and meet someone, they'll meet you and invite their friend to all queue up.

> Maybe in isolation, although in most competitive video game spaces (which is where I've met majority of my "online friends") a disagreement between two parties tend to get resolve because it disrupts the entire dynamic.

Sure but often the most easiest way to resolve nontrivial disputes online is to remove one of the participants from the community.

> It is increasingly difficult to just "drop" someone when you friends with their IRL friends, which is also pretty common. You'll play a game and meet someone, they'll meet you and invite their friend to all queue up.

Now you're bringing in real life relationships which yes are much harder to just drop.

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