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Comment by patja | Hacker News Reader

I have an eleventh grade daughter. Some of the accepted norms for her peer group that have surprised me are:

Email is just for school and ecommerce. She told me that one of her friends sent her a super long text about a crisis she was having. I said, wait, a super long text? Why didn't she send an email. Laughter ensued. Nobody uses email to communicate with friends, silly Daddy. I guess that's how you get to > 3000 sms per month.

Facebook is out. She feels like hers is the last grade to use it in any appreciable way, and even for them they mostly use it to manage events. Few of the freshmen use Facebook.

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I'm not so sure about email not being used to communicate with friends.

I'm currently a senior in college. If asked during high school, I would have said exactly what your daughter said, except with Facebook messages replacing SMS.

At my college, all organization of student groups happens over email. I very quickly went from receiving <1 email/day during high school to receiving ~20 emails/day in college. Exposure to this mailing list culture at college (and also at during internships in industry) has made me an email person. I typically don't send short emails (~2 sentence) for social messages (I use Facebook for that), but if I need to send a paragraph to someone I do it over email. My group of friends splits our planning of events 50/50 between email and Facebook messages.

I'm not sure if this is just at the college I attend or if its a more general phenomena.

College is where I learned of the necessity to get good at e-mail management.

But honestly, since I left most events/groups I'm a part of work through Facebook now. Event management with Facebook really is its killer feature as a social network.

And yet, event management in Facebook sucks. It's just where all the events are posted.

Facebook isn't good at events because of event management. It's just because they aggregate all events.

I consistently get invited to events in: New York, Montreal, San Francisco, Buenos Aires, London, and Berlin. This is by choice: If I visit one of those cities, I want to know what to do. But why can't I filter my events view so that I only see events nearby? Why do I have to have a clogged events feedback, because I want to know what's happening if I travel and don't want to hide invites certain event producers?

(Also, event sharing features suck, if you're promoting an event. You have to use Javascript hacks to share, and only then you can share with everyone in one of your top two or three cities.)

They are not good at event discovery, maybe, but for setting things up between friends I've had no major issues (especially now that I can follow the wall of an event without RSVPing).

I think your use case is very different from how most people use FB events. Though it would be nice to have good event discovery (and they probably have the data to do it).

My experience was that organized groups will use email, but only really the leadership. I would also use email to communicate with professors in college, and now with clients (but not coworkers). Basically, email is now only for communications that need to be archived. You don't use it to send a long emotional rant to a friend because once the situation is over neither of you will need it ever again, so messaging apps to the rescue! Scheduling a meeting with a teacher, however, should be done by email, so that you can go back and prove them wrong when they claim they made no such commitment.

I'm probably dating myself a little, but this was true for me as well. Pre-college, everyone used AIM. During college, most social communication happened on email lists, with some 1:1 communication happening through the first version of google chat ('gchat'). As in, the one with the desktop client.

I had exactly the same experience, except with the e-mail influx happening in high school because I went to a boarding school, and with the same end condition (50/50 e-mail vs Facebook).

EDIT: And of course after I submit the comment I realize I know you irl. Sup.

It's like that at MIT too. I also see people do one sentence emails like "Meeting at X location EOM." I never used it in high school but now it's the main form of communication for more than one on one chats.

On the flip side. Texting was something my friends and I used to do years and years ago with flip phones. But it seems impossibly outmoded and limited these days. So we all IM/email/FB these days instead -- delivery is just about as fast and interactive. I think I send/receive single digit texts in any given 12 month period, and it's usually just to direct people to use email with me instead since nobody I know texts.

My Mom however, texts with her church friends like it's going out of style. I tell myself this exemplifies my attitude of it being out-of-date. But then I hear that young kids text like crazy, or they use an app that's so close to sms that it may as well be.

Facebook for highschoolers is redundant. Once you hit college is where you really get value out of it, as you meet and network with way more people through campus, class, events, etc.

I'm in college - lots of my friends are losing interest in Facebook or dropping it altogether. Communication happens mostly through email, SMS, Groupme, Whatsapp, or Snapchat. Messenger is seen as a necessary evil.

Edit: People in college also love collecting "connections" on LinkedIn, although I've only heard of one person using it to land a job/internship.

It seems a very anecdotal topic. My uni uses it extensively, every society has a fb page that handles events, member feedback and general QA. It's been very successful imo.

Interesting, so are you not seeing albums of so and so's night out?

Or while traveling, unless you are in China, of course.

I'm 24, so (I hope) my experiences are still somewhat relevant:

When I was in high school, just like your daughter, I never used email. It was only to communicate with teachers, shipment notifications, or email updates from my favorite bands.

In college, this largely shifted with the popularity of listservs and email communication with professors.

However, what I didn't expect (and makes a lot of sense) is that, towards the end of college and after I graduated, I started emailing and Gchattng with my friends significantly more. Why? Simple explanation. We were in offices most of the day (internships then jobs), and couldn't be seen on Facebook or on our phones. But, we could have our personal email up in one of our browser tabs and no one would know.

I rarely use email for personal communication and I'm 33. I just never found it to be a good medium for personal info. I'd rather have a real time conversation with someone.

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