from Hacker News

Making friends on the internet

by jborichevskiy on 5/3/22, 12:18 AM with 61 comments

• by avgDev on 5/4/22, 4:07 PM

  The problem with Twitter, and other social media where people use their real name and photo is that in fact people are NEVER going to be themselves. People want to show their best to the world. I don't want to meet 'Yes' friends or 'always positive' friends. Social media is fake. There is no way around it. LinkedIn is fake and disgusting, looking at my feed for a second when I'm responding to recruiters makes me want to vomit.

  I have known people who were going through divorces, abusive relationships and major life issues, all while their social media feeds were showing how great everything is going.

  The only 'REAL" people I met online were either focused niche/small subreddits or gaming communities. As you build trust you learn more and more about their real life, good and bad. Growing up I met a girl who was going through chemo treatment and could not leave her home due to all the severe side effects. This was in one of the gaming communities. I really enjoyed her company and it really opened my eyes. Internet was/is an amazing place, I was able to really connect with someone who normally would not open up to strangers. In the end, I didn't really know her IRL, maybe that is why she was able to open up and be direct about sharing her thoughts about suffering, life and death. I have not been able to connect with anyone like this IRL, is it me that doesn't seem trustworthy or approachable?

• by djhworld on 5/4/22, 6:45 PM

  One thing I really miss about the modern web is forums.

  I'm in my 30s now but grew up on the web, from 1998 - so not exactly an old timer but enough to ride the wave of web 1.0 -> 2.0.

  I made loads of friends on forums in those days. Sadly most of those forums died off as time has gone by. One still exists though but there's only a handful of us left, it's extremely rare to get a new member.

  I know these days everyone uses Discord or Slack or whatever the one is the rust people use (zulip?) but chat isn't the same as forums.

• by zackmorris on 5/4/22, 6:18 PM

  I wonder how VR will change this.

  I got into tech as a teenager in the 90s because I was such an introvert and it felt like a way to game the system and maybe meet girls or avoid having to get an actual job.

  Hah. Waking up every day in this bizarro world of endless overwork just to survive while some other geek wins it all and disappoints humanity has gotten stale. And even with all of this connectedness, people often feel more separated than ever. Like everything I ever wanted came to pass in a corrupted fashion.

  So far VR is one of the few things that I consider a tentative cure for depression. I think it's because shifting out of this reality is pretty much guaranteed to feel better than staying at this point. So maybe VR will end up being the internet that I thought this one was going to be.

• by jarenmf on 5/4/22, 4:26 PM

  I made a lot of friends on IRC and internet forums a long time ago. It is much easier when you are anonymous and be truly yourself. I miss these communities nowadays and can't really find a replacement.

• by thdc on 5/4/22, 4:20 PM

  In my opinion, the answer has always been to participate in group activities that cover something you're interested in, as it gives an easy starting point to begin a friendship. For me, it is either games or certain coding niches.

  As a non-user of Twitter, I don't think its organization is conducive to easily finding friends - instead of focused individual communities, I believe it is more free-form (?) as a result of "the algorithm" determining your interests. Which could be considered a plus because of discovery as noted in the article.

  I do see how you could extrapolate similar interests from other users based on their tweets or replies and bootstrap a friendship from that as the author mentions (kind of risky when dealing with anonymized opinions about controversial topics or just straight up lies), but it seems like much more work compared to participating in a group which you know already shares that interest.

  To summarize, finding friends on Twitter is kind of like shooting in the dark.

  However I initially missed the main point of the post because it was stuck towards the bottom after the list.

  > translat(ing) these (online connections) into offline connections.

  So now my question is why do you need to make your online connections offline? I have good friendships that are ongoing for years with people that I've only met online and have never felt the need to meet them offline. Note that I don't consider setting up an irl meeting online then meeting them irl as "making friends on the internet" unless I have been regularly interacting for a while already in somewhat private circumstances (like daily casual talk or playing games together).

• by kowlo on 5/4/22, 3:22 PM

  Not sure what it's like now, but over a decade ago I made "online friends" on online games. Those were great times... Legend of Mir 2, Phantasy Star Online, Gunbound, even WoW!

• by sebmellen on 5/4/22, 2:49 PM

  Hey Jon! We're friends (followers-of-one-another...?) on Twitter. Super cool to see a post from you here. Small world!

  I'll take this as an opportunity to 'send that dm / email / offer to connect'. Going to send you a message on Twitter.

• by schlagetown on 5/4/22, 3:39 PM

  Good post, a lot rings true in my experience! Twitter is a uniquely good place to meet people, though it requires a lot of work and calibration to use successfully, and it takes practice to be yourself in a public broadcast medium. But I feel like curating a quality follows list and interacting with people you like online has very high ROI. And it's worth taking the initiative — asking good questions, planning casual events, proposing ideas for collaboration — even if not everything pans out, it's about increasing the surface area for serendipity, opening up more possible paths, planting seeds…

• by andrewmcwatters on 5/4/22, 7:29 PM

  I feel like the structures engineers design in the tech world sort of work against making friends in some ways by emphasizing certain aspects of the software we use away from people. lin83's comment here about enforced behaviors rings true to me.

  My experience with the regression of social interaction enforced by software is the lack of server browsers in video games. Matchmaking is such crap. Kids don't even really get to experience local multiplayer, but to make things worse, you can't often find servers online and establish making yourself a regular with some people on a dedicated server much anymore.

• by fold3 on 5/5/22, 4:02 AM

  I've met really incredible people with lastfm personally. It was around 2010 in Berlin and other European cities. Also soulseek to some extent but we've never met irl. On the other hand, I've never met or had any meaningful talk with people from dating apps/website. It just doesn't feel like it's made for people like me.

• by EZ-Cheeze on 5/4/22, 4:55 PM

  The internet should be making friends for us.

  Find me everyone who GETS ME. I want a thousand or more

• by lampshades on 5/4/22, 2:56 PM

  I miss AIM.

• by rejectfinite on 5/4/22, 6:43 PM

  Twitter?? I have more luck with Discord servers. Where people actually chat.

• by codybrown on 5/4/22, 4:25 PM

  soulful post. for all the hell/chaos of twitter, it's still the equivalent of OkCupid for meaningful friendships.

• by jackallis on 5/4/22, 7:05 PM

  i would like a friend who is comfortable being vulnerable with me and viceversa.Idk how social media provides that.

• by evocatus on 5/4/22, 2:45 PM

  > it starts with twitter

  No thanks. If this is the state of socialization in an era where online discourse is controlled by private interests with "agile" ethics, and people are too afraid to socialize in real life for a growing number of reasons, I'll deepen my mastery of hermitage.