[feralchimp]

I was an outspoken Facebook-hater for a long time. Perhaps my most quotable moment on HN to date was saying "I have no love for their product or their business model, but their engineering is diesel."

My wife recently convinced me to give it another try. I didn't use my complete name, and was judicious about the information I associated with my profile. And yet, I proceeded to connect in a deep and healthy way with some people that I'd fallen out of touch with, and nurtured some newer relationships.

It's a tool that has a Tendency to be dangerous, prying, and abusive to its members. But even as a field of vast moral hazard, I've come to view it as "navigable and worth the risks."

Perhaps not the most glowing endorsement, but if they can convince me they're more valuable than they are dangerous, they've really done some things right in the last few years.

[joering2]

> connect in a deep and healthy way with some people that I'd fallen out of touch with

You must have had fallen out of touch for a reason, hadn't you?

I think this is the major reason why I am not using Facebook to find and connect with my old friends. If those connection would have been worth keeping up with, I am sure I wouldn't have lost them at the first place. Now, of course there are stories when some family members got lost at teen age and found each other through social network, I get it, but those are in minor, gems worth a short article on social blog.

After you re-connected with them again, after a while, most likely the same thing will happen. You will get out of regular touch and they will fall in the grey zone. Of course its harder to "loose" people nowaday because we living in much smaller world. And on the top of that, if you are a hard worker, if you have family, a bunch of close friends with whom you socialize, go to restaurants, movies, camping, etc, then do you really find time to socialize online? Isn't it enough that we forget about our spouses or parents birthdays sometimes, about anniversaries, other important events, don't always make on time to pick up son or daughter from school? I believe if you at least try to fullfill your daily obligations towards your job, families and friends, then you don't have time for social networking.

[feralchimp]

This might be one of the rare cases where "you'll understand when you're older" is the most elegant and truthful response available.

But I'll understand if that's not very satisfying, so...

Interpersonal connections just do not exist in some sort of static and immutable categorical hierarchy, wherein all those that share in the Platonic ideal of WORTH KEEPING are definitely kept above some threshold of positive health and repair, and those that do not are just as destined to fade naturally. If you're "sure that" you would recognize and maintain any connection that is worth keeping, then you're only correct insofar as the connection might not be worth maintaining for the other person. :)

The reason for this is that, in short, you can't see as far into the future as you think you can.

As you get older, you (hopefully) gain some perspectives that retroactively change the past. You occasionally notice important, even semi-profound things about people you used to know; things you had never really noticed before, that you could not have possibly noticed before because circumstances had not yet unearthed those facets of their character. High school isn't life. College isn't life. The first ten years of your career aren't life.

"Life changing" experience can come at any time, and it doesn't just change your life after the experience, but also reaches back into your experience of things that occured before.

drops mic

[joering2]

> "you'll understand when you're older"

In order to know this you had to be young and "get older". Social networks are only 10 years old, approx.

What social network did you use 25 years ago?

[feralchimp]

Social network != internet-connected social network. My statements are more about people (and the experience of living among them) than they are about Facebook or any other internet site. Graph visibility / searchability has increased, bandwidth has increased, latency has decreased. But the rules of human interaction and gaining perspective on the human condition have more or less (I suspect, not really my field) stayed relatively consistent since the days of parchment and ship transit.

[JoeAltmaier]

Lots of rationalizations for why you don't keep in touch. Lets admit that geography, convenience, jobs get in the way as often as anything. It takes little time investment to write a thoughtful note to an old friend, facebook or not. It doesn't have to be family vs friends, we can make time for both.

[ben1040]

>You must have had fallen out of touch for a reason, hadn't you?

This is exactly what made me realize it was OK for me to drop Facebook.

I was unreasonably worried that I would again lose touch with these people who were my friends back in college. We fell out of contact after graduation, and then rediscovered on Facebook years later. These were folks with whom I didn't have a whole lot in common at all - maybe I might have lived on the same dorm floor with them, or maybe we were study pals in data structures class, or something else similarly un-meaningful.

Then there were the people I actually cared about and made efforts to keep up friendships. I looked through my phone contact list, and realized not only did I have telephone numbers and email addresses for every last one of them, but I had made use of it often. Facebook was not how I communicated with the people that matter anyway.

[orijing]

Imagine it this way. Your friends are data, you have limited capacity, and you access them with some pattern. Suppose you live in a world without Facebook.

Your wife and kids are in your registers. You see them all the time, and generally they're either a room away or (at the most) a phone call away.

Your best friends are in your L1 cache. Sometimes they come up to the registers after you've been hanging out with them for a while, but even if not, they're only a phone call or text away in the L1 cache.

...

Your friend from elementary school you haven't talked to for years is on disk swap. He lives in Japan, and you might want to contact him if you're traveling there.

In that world, it's still very cheap to access your most frequently-accessed connections--your wife, kids, best friends. However, as you go down the memory hierarchy it becomes very expensive to access them. And so, you contact them less often.

Enter Facebook. Now your friend from Japan is only a post away. You don't have time to have email threads with all of your friends, down to that friend from elementary school. But you can occasionally keep up with that friend by browsing to his timeline, occasionally seeing some major events "X got engaged", and maybe sending a light message. Suddenly your disk became an SSD and it became much cheaper to keep in contact.

Your registers and L1 caches haven't changed much. Now you can contact them in the medium that's most convenient at the time. You can message them from your phone (fb messenger), or skype them on your computer, but you can also just call them or talk to them. Facebook gives you more options for accessing the most-accessed friends. As a result, it both expands the size of your caches and main memory, but also makes each level faster to access so you can keep in touch with more of them.

So I don't think the right approach is to think of friends in a binary fashion: Worth keeping in touch with, and not worth keeping in touch with.

Instead, it's a gradient, and communication platforms like Facebook just improve the gradient so it's worthwhile (i.e. possible and easy) to keep in touch with a lot more of your friends.

[tedunangst]

Facebook provides a low friction way to stay in contact with people. If I were getting a daily status update email from each of my 100 friends, I'd go crazy. Checking FB while waiting for the subway is easy. Similarly, I can publish updates without worrying too much that I'm secretly infuriating my friends who have more important things to be reading. I can post interesting links without imposing the expectation that you read them (as would happen if I emailed a cool story around). I don't mean to sell something you don't want to buy, but a semi-private microblogging platform is a wholly different connection experience than email.

[loceng]

The same convenience can exist on a different platform, that doesn't have the same abuse of its members/participants.