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Comment by United857 | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era. You don't need to reach out to your friends anymore, instead, we just consume each other's broadcasts.

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I disagree. Modern communication, such as Facebook, email and phones enable us to maintain friendships over time and distances that previously was unrealistic. Twenty years ago, this would have been an instance of "someone I used to be friends with died." The difference here is that because of the modern communication available, there's an expectation that we can maintain the relationship over time and distance, even if we only catch up a few times in a year. In the past, these people would be more likely to disappear from our lives entirely.

An argument can be made that if people have disappeared from our lives entirely that indicates neither party was truly interested in maintaining that relationship. A friendship worth maintaining is worth maintaining even when it's not easy or convenient.

So we keep in touch with these people we would ordinarily have forgotten about, or perhaps had an occasional thought about but not cared enough to pursue. Is this change encouraging a meaningful relationship, or just a superficial one?

Deleted my FB account once I had the realization above. People I speak to regularly, I speak to regularly regardless. Not surprisingly, none of the 'long lost' contacts I picked up have kept in touch with me since then; nor have I attempted to keep in touch with them.

Which just serves to reinforce my point - when it was no longer convenient, we stopped keeping in touch. Which means that neither party actually cared enough to pursue it.

I don't agree with your sentiments. People have tendency to get wrapped up in what is in front of them. Hence they lose contact with people who are far away, even though contacting them is no harder than contacting people who live nearby. When that goes on long enough, there's an awkwardness to contact them again, and people have a tendency to avoid that awkwardness.

Social media makes it easier to avoid and mitigate that awkwardness. The obvious response is, "That awkwardness shouldn't matter," but "should" is a big word. It still matters.

>A friendship worth maintaining is worth maintaining even when it's not easy or convenient.

False dichotomy. Friendships come on a continuum. If facebook shifts some of the marginal ones over the line from "not worth maintaining" to "worth maintaining", surely that's a good thing.

One day I saw on facebook that an old acquaintance was looking for company at an interesting-sounding dinner. So we went there and had a good evening. We've been in very little contact before or since, and would probably not have been in touch at all without facebook - but that was a nice evening nevertheless, and well worth having facebook for.

This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.

Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you".

Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.

I agree. Now change the tile of this article to, "A distant friend died two years ago and I didn't know about it." And no one clicks.

I don't see the point of this. Isn't distant friend a subset of "friend" as a group? This seems unnecessarily cynical about the title of this post.

There's emotional distance and there's physical distance. I have been very close to people who are now very far from me. The fact that we don't get to speak often these days says nothing about the quality of the bond. Still very sad...

BOOL: type specifier incorrect

Maybe not your friend today, but how about your friend from yesteryear? I reach out periodically to old friends that I have absolutely no contact with (no Facebook, no nothing) just to see how they are doing and reminisce, and they do the same.

Your whole life you meet new and interesting people. Some you're close friends with for a while, but life takes you your own separate ways. When you meet years later, often you wonder how you were friends. But a few, you can pick up the conversation just like it was yesterday. They're still close friends - it's just the contact that's intermittent; life gets in the way.

And before Facebook, people's reach to many of their friends was exchanging a postcard once a year.

And yet, where would we be without it? And it's not entirely passive. I hate Facebook in many ways but am thankful I get to see pics of my friend's babies and share sports news with friends I just dont have time to talk on the phone with often.

> Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era.

How many close friends do you think your grandparents had? How many people did they interact with? This is not a byproduct of passivity, but a byproduct of having a larger pool of "friends."

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