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I am surprised that nobody has filled the niche that facebook is useful for, keeping track of distant acquaintances. Facebook was decent in 2010 when it let users keep track of their second cousin's graduation and high school classmate's new house. There should still be a market for a listing of life events for people on the periphery of your life. Linkedin has weirdly enough partially filled the role but there is no true platform for this.
You knew, but did you care? I think that's what ultimately did the platform in. Seeing pictures of people you actually knew was one thing. Seeing the wedding pictures of someone you hadn't talked to in a decade was just crap that cluttered up your feed. There was a certain novelty to it for a while, but as soon as people realized that that was as far as the relationship was ever going to go (or, more ominously, that they had no interest of pursuing the relationship any further), the novelty wore off and people stopped caring. I'm not going to lose any sleep over the fact that I no longer know what some guy I was sort of friends with in college is up to now.
People's opinions on this are going to differ, but I personally really like being able to passively keep up with people I was once close with.
The tall awkward girl who flirted with me in high school is now married to an indian guy and is a therapist out in LA, my study buddy from college is swimming and biking a lot and recently changed jobs, another reconnected with the girl we always knew he was destined for and has a kid....
I do see these people in real life occasionally as I travel back home, attend a wedding, or put together a guy's trip. Being able to launch directly into relevant conversation is worthwhile, and I still actually do care about what they're up to.
Sure, there were some folks who went off the deep end in some sort of way, and changed beyond recognition or value as people. But is a tweet or some harebrained shit from reddit really more worthwhile content than staying connected to the mostly-good people I've met? I'd argue no. I miss Facebook quite a bit.
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Yeah, I’ve heard other people say this in real life too, that there was this brief period from like 2009 to 2017 when you actually knew what your random high school friends and extended family had going on in their personal lives on a weirdly intimate basis, and now nobody knows anymore. You get curated glimpses of it on Instagram (although most users just lurk or post once a year), and you see the career side on LinkedIn like you say, but it’s not the same.
IMO it's not that weird: My parents' generation sends annual Christmas cards with updates on career moves, births, deaths, graduations, and marriages to people they might not have seen IRL in a decade.
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