Ask HN: I had more friends before Facebook. Anyone agree?

I've help organize a number of events in and around Phoenix, AZ, and my favorites have always been the ones where there was little planning and lots of room for socializing and discussion.

Most of the time the info presented at these events could be found on the 'Net, likely faster and in more detail.

If information efficiency were the goal then that would be the way to go. But at the better gathering the talks or presentations are just a ruse to trick people into getting away from their homes or cubicles and interact in real-time with actual flesh and blood people. Serendipity takes over from there. That's why the best conferences have short talks and lots of breathing room; you want to prod people into talking to each other.

I can see the same thing with getting all your social info from a Webs site. Sure, Facebook will tell you when someone has seen a movie, but without that real-time, F2F (or even phone )conversation you miss the meandering dialog that bounces around into all sorts of areas you didn't even think to talk about until that moment.

The digital life can end up being awfully clinical. Lots of data, not much information.

That's more or less the thesis of Sherry Turkle's recent book Alone Together, which you might find interesting. It's also interesting because Turkle was quite techo-optimist in the '80s; The Second Self (1984) was much more positive on the role of computers (and things like the then-new BBS scene) for interpersonal relationships.

I agree with you completely, and I've even said it before here on HN: Facebook (as it is now) inhibits active social behaviour. (At least among those that aren't your close friends.) Why chase down or call up "random friend X from college" to see how they are and what they've been up to when you can get the digest version on Facebook?

Finally, we're starting to see through the mess that Facebook is causing. It seems so innocuous and fun at first, but it takes years until we look back and realize exactly what you're saying now. I remember having hours of conversation with friends prior to Facebook via the phone. Now, it's like it's expected that I'll "just know" what my friends are doing (after all, they took the time to post it, so they almost take it as a form of offense if I don't know what they're up to. "What? You didn't see my post about my gardening project?").

I really hope our generation figures out how to get out of this quagmire somehow. I fear, however, that just as innocently as we started this project now known and accepted as "social media", we will be too far down the rabbit hole to reverse course, let alone even recognize what we've done to our true relationships with internet communication.

How old are you? I'm tempted to chalk this up to cointegration between you losing friends (like many others) while growing older and Facebook's popularity increasing.

Its harder to make friends as you grow older, and you grow apart from friends over the years, so your net # of friends declines with time. Meanwhile, we're growing up while Facebook becomes more popular. Thus, it's easy to blame FB for a traditional phenomenon related to the passage of time in one's life.

I hardly ever log in to my facebook account. It's not really my cup of tea. Nonetheless, I can somewhat relate to your experience in that at one time I had a good friend online who stopped emailing me and then popped in out of the blue to comment on something I had posted on my website. It turns out this person had begun following my website and that apparently met their needs and they felt no need to actually engage me in conversation. This was kind of an icky moment for me. The friendship later ended.

I continue to wrestle with my relationship to such things. You can only have so many actual close friends. There are only so many hours in the day and close friendship requires sustained, on-going interaction to maintain. For this reason, I tend to think "social networks" are doomed to be shallow affairs. Yet, paradoxically, I find that I share a lot more info online than I do with most folks I know in person. I'm not shy there just isn't enough time in the day to explain some things to everyone I meet, so I just don't want to open up some can of worms. Still, I wrestle with this process where I seem to gradually be working on developing an online audience where the relationship is inherently lopsided: Other people often know a great deal more about me than I know about them. But this isn't really what I think of as friendship and I like having friends, which have been a tad scarce of late (remaking your life usually causes you to shed friends).

I don't have answers for you. Just sharing some of my own internal questions, FWIW.

could it be you were younger?

to paraphrase Jerry Seinfeld (badly) you get to a certain age and don't take on any new friends. that's it you're full

I can relate. I have an old high school friend that I used to maintain pretty regular contact with via email since I moved interstate. Early on in the Facebook rise we both had accounts, she still uses her's but I lost interest in it. However, to her online social interaction = facebook and we no longer email each other.

I find Twitter is a bit different though, since it is not like putting your whole life up on a page, it can just be short catchups fairly regularly. Maybe it's better in this respect because it doesn't try to take the place of things like phone calls and email in the way Facebook does.