Ask HN: Is anyone else losing friends in droves?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23481237

by lonelysf • 6 years ago

44 61 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hopefully not directly from the pandemic.

During the Facebook debacle last week, a fair number of my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety.

Is anyone else experiencing pressure to defend their values harder than ever, to the point of conversation deadlock?

It used to be a lot easier to maintain a diverse group of friends, so I'm curious about any of your experiences through times like these.

How do you stay creative, balanced, cope with lots of change, ...

thank you.

jacobush• 6 years ago

I preemptively removed the FB app for now. I don’t know if this is a fruitful strategy in the long run but I sleep better right now.

asgasdarrrr• 6 years ago

Are you sure these are friends, or just aquaintances? If you do consider them friends, why do you feel you must lose them due to their personal beliefs?

pieterk7• 6 years ago

Let's consider them to be friends for the argument in this discussion. And also, that I'm sensitive and unforgiving when it comes to trust.

If now someone coughs in my face, without a mask, which has happened. not sure if I should write them in my will. Because they may not have my security in their best interest.

seibelj• 6 years ago

a fair number of my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety

I can't understand what you are hinting at here, or why it's related to FB. Maybe I'm out of the loop.

But in my experience, the majority of people don't religiously post on social media and have moderate views on most things. So extreme people on all sides are not representative of most people.

_bxg13• 6 years ago

My interpretation of the above is that the OP has friends who support dismantling or at least re-building the police as an institution, and the OP sees this as a threat to his or her safety and is getting into conflict over the matter. FB recently received a lot of backlash from employees and others over deciding not to hide posts from the president suggesting imminent military violence against protesters.

jkhdigital2• 6 years ago

Keep mouth closed, ears open. Repeat serenity prayer:

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

Regarding the wisdom, I generally start with a null hypothesis that anything I can physically do with my body (which includes words produced by my mouth or my fingertips) is in the latter category, and everything else is in the former until I have overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

But anyways, I can relate a little. My sister has never been an activist type, never said anything about racial justice, until a week ago when she started posting BLM content on Facebook with a demand that anyone who disagrees should go ahead and unfriend her now. It was a shockingly abrupt change.

znpy2• 6 years ago

But anyways, I can relate a little. My sister has never been an activist type, never said anything about racial justice, until a week ago when she started posting BLM content on Facebook with a demand that anyone who disagrees should go ahead and unfriend her now. It was a shockingly abrupt change.

Count me in. And I'm not even in the US.

The thing is, the currently unfolding events are about Black Lives and the systemic discrimination and criminalization of black people in the US. But are about democracy too, and by a lot. And this is important considering how much influent the USA are on other nations.

Over the last two weeks we started seeing the US military (police corps and national guards) open fire agains its own military, repressing dissent and targeting journalists specifically. We have seen racial discrimination in clear sight, police brutality and police representatives unable to admit fault even with footage. We've seen cops planting bricks to charge protestors. We've seen police telling white dudes armed but not protesting to stay inside so that it doesn't look like they're playing favourites.

We've seen the police shoot the medics: that's war crime, for christ's sake.

As an italian, this reminds me A FUCKING LOT of the history pages about the rising of fascism in Italy.

I genuinely believe that the USA are becoming a fascist country, and that the outcome of these protests and the election in november will definitively declare what kind of nation the USA are.

I'm not asking people to unfriend me because I'm not on facebook. But I feel a lot more the need to do something instead of the usual nothing about world politics.

TL;DR: the current events are crazier than have ever been, and immensely scary.

archagon• 6 years ago

The rise of the far right, and the ambivalence of so many people in my community towards this rise, leaves me in a permanent state of anger/despair. There's many more lines in the sand for me now, and much less charity towards my fellow man. I'm glad that I have close friends and family with whom I can have more nuanced discussions, since there's a baseline of trust and empathy in those relationships — but I'm not sure what I would do if they suddenly started spouting Fox News bulletpoints. It all sucks.

thu21114• 6 years ago

The problem is people who disagree with you can also make a long list of scary events they've seen that lead to the opposite conclusions.

For instance the riots have now killed more people than unarmed blacks killed by the US police last year. They've been attacking statues of Abraham Lincoln, who fought a war to end slavery. That doesn't look like the work of anti-racists.

So whose lists of talking points wins?

BTW "if Trump wins we're a fascist dictatorship" was a talking point tried in the last election too. He won and so far he's been rather the model of federalism, surprisingly so given the hype. For a supposed fascist he's remarkably content to delegate power to regional governors.

rdtwo• 6 years ago

So your friends fractured into anti maskers and pro maskers?

Or anti protesters / protesters?

I’m Confused so many decisive issues to deal with

non-entity• 6 years ago

Not really, I havent had any friends for years, but I've witnessed family go from relatively mild to full blown conspiracy-theorists within the past year, which is pretty alarming.

verdverm• 6 years ago

Conspiracy theories flourish when people are disillusioned with the leaders / govt. I know many others struggling with this, I know it must be difficult.

Go get researched up on the psychology behind it, there are some good posts here with links, and good stuff from couple years back. You won't be able to change their minds with logic or facts

cpr• 6 years ago

Or maybe the so-called "conspiracies" are becoming more obviously true with recent revelations?

Lotsa people being red-pilled these days...

rayiner• 6 years ago

Don’t buy into the notion that speech and beliefs are an attack on your “safety.” That’s just a tactic to elevate a certain class of political beliefs above the usual debate. It’s a poisonous notion.

Of course, ideas that lead to policy matter in the aggregate. But I don’t think it’s productive to “lose friends” because their policy preferences, if adopted, through some long and attenuated causal chain might be contrary to your personal interests. Over the last year, I’ve become deeply concerned about the ideas espoused by many of my friends. I’m an immigrant to this country and for the most part love it for what it is. I think many of the notions my Facebook friends subscribe to will in the long term change the country for the worse, and lead to a worse future for my children. Indeed, it wouldn’t be historically unprecedented for these ideas, if taken too far, to lead to real suffering and physical harm to many people. But I know these people and I’m convinced they hold all of their beliefs in good faith. I’m not going to hold it against them that I think that the policies they support may be wrong or even harmful in the long run.

pieterk7• 6 years ago

Your response was very healing, thank you. I do believe that every man is acting in their world's best interest, too.

The sun will rise again tomorrow.

cryptonector• 6 years ago

What FB debacle? I don't use FB, so I'd not know.

millette• 6 years ago

Not an FB user but yes, in the last couple of months. Or was it more discovering what "friend" really means. Either way, I'm actually happier now.

scottlocklin• 6 years ago

Sounds like you are caught up in some horrific FB dopamine loop[1]. You really don't need to engage with people on the internet; it's totally optional, and not particularly "social." You especially don't need to engage with people on that toxic shit-hole which is designed to make you unhappy. You can either remove the app from your ipotato, or quit. I occasionally hear about shenanigans on FB from my actual friends. None of it makes any sense.

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/phone-addiction-formula/

hashkb4• 6 years ago

This is a great answer that's totally orthogonal to the issue at hand, so I love it. No matter how you read OP, staying out of internet arguments is a good way to preserve friendships, if that's your goal. I'm going to hit "reply" now....

_bxg13• 6 years ago

My interpretation of the above is that you have friends who support dismantling or at least re-building the police as an institution, and that you see this as a threat to your safety and you're getting into conflict over the matter. With that assumption, I would say:

a) Take a step back and ask yourself how much your safety is really being threatened by others' opinions on these matters. Also, as an exercise, consider the degree of un-safety that millions have been experiencing for many years which resulted in the current conflict. Even if you don't agree with your friends' conclusions, I'd bet you can at least sympathize with the root of the issue.

b) Relationships are maintained through tolerance. I maintain a good relationship with my parents despite having a polar-opposite political viewpoint, by putting what I know of them as people ahead of the words of their professed, abstract ideology. The two are not the same thing. Leaving some wiggle-room there is key to reducing conflict, which is key to maintaining lasting relationships. You have to be able to agree to disagree sometimes.

stonogo• 6 years ago

My interpretation was that the OP has friends who oppose increased accountability or demilitarizion of the police, and that they saw this as a threat to safety. How would that interpretation modify your answers?

_bxg13• 6 years ago

It would depend on where the friends' views are rooted.

If the friend is saying "My uncle is a cop who's never done anything wrong and he doesn't deserve to be lumped in with the ones causing trouble", I could actively sympathize with that.

If the friend is saying "I still think it's only a few bad cops and that the protesters are causing more trouble overall than the cops", I would tend to think that person was misinformed and maybe try to share new information with them if I thought it would make a difference, but I would also leave it be if I had to for the sake of the friendship (this is my situation with my parents).

If the friend is saying "Strong-man governments are great, people should bow down and stop trying to hold the police accountable, they shouldn't have to be accountable to anybody", then that would tell me something about the person's moral center and I don't see myself wanting to remain friends with that kind of person at all.

hashkb4• 6 years ago

I also read it this way; but rereading OP it's unclear.

pieterk7• 6 years ago

The question is more "who is going to reform the police, and how?". I trust my friends, but not the organizations they support.

Have you have ever been held up by a corrupt officer? One that is not wearing a badge or uniform. Or one that can be bribed? Acceptable, only outside of American police jurisdiction.

Inside America, the law ought to keep you safe. Cherish your institutions, enforce the law.

Do stop injustice and discrimination. The law should not speak about race.

Which in the most populous areas is passé anyway. Cities are mixed. If you look at any photo of the protests, you'll see voters from all walks of life.

You won't see the >75 population protesting. But they might be on facebook, some of them.

Perhaps like your parents. I wish you all love and understanding.

Unfortunately for them however, among the most successful facebookers are populists. That's what the algorithm stimulated.

The loud voices that want to burn the American Dream down to the ground, worldwide.

We'll see less of it for a while, but humans are stronger than bots, and facebook is not going to resist making bn's.

Just break up the damn corporation.

downerending3• 6 years ago

Things have definitely changed. Twenty years ago, I had friends with a wide variety of opinions, and it generally seemed possible to disagree without it being a problem.

These days, generally only the people to my "right" seem like this. It's rare to be able to talk long with someone to my "left" without them becoming offended. That seems particularly unusual, as I've been pretty far to the left my entire life.

It's tempting to look at the 2016 election as the cause, but I started really noticing this about a year before that.

D13Fd2• 6 years ago

I honestly think part of it is foreign state influence on social media, through literal fake news (not "they're biased," but "we faked a publication with fake events that never happened"), memes, and targeted manipulation designed to inflame divisions.

We're literally under attack, and these divisions are the result. For example, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- while controlled by Republicans -- concluded that driving factions of the U.S. ideologically apart is a chief aim of Russia's social media efforts. See pages 20-22 of Volume 2 of the 2019 Report on Russian Active Measures Campaigns:

https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...

Specifically, the Republican Senate concluded that Russia's aim is to erode trust in the media, drive polarization, feed information that drives support for all political extremes (far-left, far-right, and other), and "exploit societal divisions that already exist, rather than attempt to create new ruptures." They also want to "bait[] governments to respond in a heavy-handed or improper fashion that is irreconcilable with the nation's principles and civil liberties."

It's working.

downerending3• 6 years ago

I think there's something to this, but perhaps a bit more complex. A lot of the "fake news" I see is coming straight from NYT and WaPo, so not directly due to "bots" or whatever. But certainly it's plausible that a foreign entity could be indirectly plotting to destroy the credibility of those papers, as a general morale destroyer. Watching our papers of record debase themselves is an awful sight.

The broad "bot" concept could be in play, but people are so cheap that I suspect it's funded humans instead. There does seem to be something amplifying our tendencies towards polarization.

Thirty years ago, if someone had a wacky set of ideas, people would point and laugh. These days, they're relatively more likely to clubbed into submission, forced into a struggle session, or just cancelled completely.

thu21114• 6 years ago

But this "Russians want to sow discord" thing is a conspiracy theory. It's been investigated a billion times and the allegations always fall apart, yet people don't reduce their belief in it - it's sort of like UFOs in that regard.

We can even trace its evolution because it's not that old.

Before the Trump election campaign, Russia wasn't being talked about much. The sudden spike in Russia/bot/fake news etc related conspiracies aligns exactly with Trump winning and the American left going into a sort of meltdown as they tried to explain why their candidate didn't flatten him. "Fake news" started as an attack on Trump which he then co-opted because the American right had been complaining about biased media for a lot longer than the left, so it was easy for him to do so as the base was already primed.

We can even spot the moment at which the conspiracy changed from being "Russians want to get Trump elected" to "Russians want to sow generic discord". It was the moment Facebook revealed the list of adverts purchased by Russians during the election campaign, and it turned out that it was a total mix of ads for both sides! The ads weren't all for Trump at all, which was inexplicable given the claims up to that point. (actually a simple explanation is that the FB analysis was just selecting random false positives rather than shadowy Russian operators as they believed).

So overnight true believers changed their beliefs to be "Russians want us to fight each other" which is ridiculous, because American politics has been famously divided and divisive for years. Like with George W Bush, who is apparently redeemed now, but I remember when he was supposedly just as bad as Trump is considered today. Why would anyone waste money on trying to create something Americans do just fine creating themselves?

happytoexplain• 6 years ago

For what a single anecdote is worth, my experience is the political inverse of yours. I had many right-of-me friends who slowly stopped being able to converse with me without becoming angry or offended, and I'm very non-confrontational with friends and family. I always give them the utmost benefit of the doubt. On top of that, I'm not even very far left. But our friendships fell apart when they started using phrases like "disgustingly liberal". It's beyond awful what's happening to society. I can count my remaining right-of-me friends on one hand - they're more emotionally steady than the others had been, and can have disagreements without becoming bitter.

diN0bot• 6 years ago

"my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety"

someone who is comfortable harming a friend is not being a friend. if you've told someone that they're harming you, and they won't change at the very least for the simple reason that _you're friends_...

maybe they used to be good friends and things changed, or maybe these weren't good friends to begin with. either way, now is a good time to make new friends.

best of luck. it's tough, especially during lockdown when it's harder to connect over shared interests in the real world, but it's very worthwhile.

in conclusion: real friends can have productive conflict that doesn't ignore the core respect and concern each person has for the other's wellbeing. you deserve real friends.

Overtonwindow• 6 years ago

Stand by your principles and beliefs. If they were really your friends they would respect you for it. Maybe it’s time to find new friends.

catacombs• 6 years ago

During the Facebook debacle last week, a fair number of my friends have publicly supported interests that seem directly opposed to my safety.

Can you elaborate?

anthonygd2• 6 years ago

FWIW - I periodically remind myself that everyone I know is deeply flawed and is wrong to various extents on most topics. That includes myself.

Talk is cheap, so people say (passionately) things with virtually no thought. Wait to see what people do and decide whether it's a _direct_ threat. If there's a 7 step chain of causation that's threatening, then you should relax and acknowledge you're probably wrong. The other part is you should make sure your actions directly align with your values.

Don't be this guy: https://xkcd.com/386/

hashkb4• 6 years ago

Imagine technical debt, but on a societal scale. Haven't you had to fix some code; or organizational process/workflow if you're not an engineer; where the root cause was layers below the symptom?

anthonygd2• 6 years ago

Yep to both. For years I've been a practicing engineer who manages.

Surprising similar strategies: pick an ideal target state; get buy-in from stake holders (fellow engineers or business people); come up with a multi-step plan with milestones; get started. If the milestones aren't getting completed and the target isn't measurably closer, you have a problem.

Rewriting the code over the weekend doesn't work. Using positional power to decree changes doesn't work either. Well, if either of those work then it wasn't that serious of a change anyway.

jkhdigital2• 6 years ago

Except society isn’t even remotely comparable to a business process or software module, and the notion of “root cause” is questionable at best when you have a chaotic system with layer upon layer of feedback loops.

motohagiography• 6 years ago

I tried to create a throwaway account using Tor to provide a sincere personal view of this topic, with valuable experience and which also needed strong anonymity as not to put specific people at risk, but the recatchpa rejects the Tor connection.

That this seemed necessary at all is itself sufficient to describe where we are.

sdinsn• 6 years ago

That this seemed necessary

It is not necessary. Please don't exaggerate.

sethammons• 6 years ago

I agree with the GP: it does not matter which side of a topic you are on, which ever side it is, it could come back an bite you professionally. It is wisest to either be anonymous or not engage.

thrawy9939938• 6 years ago

I think base assumptions and understandings are different for different people. However, we are now fully polarized on the topics.

Lockdowns: you fully support lockdowns or you want a hair cut or to murder my grandma. No room for any other interpretation or asking of questions.

Protests: you are literally a racist if you are not actively anti-racist. No room for other interpretations or asking of questions. Do not try to distract from the core message by talking about looting or rioting.

Politics: either you want to remove Trump from office or you are a racist or otherwise a terrible person. No room for other interpretation.

De-funding the police: you are a racist or a fascist and support police brutality or you want police removed from normal public interaction. Again, no room for a different interpretation or dialog.

I feel the problem is polarized politics and lack of room for dialog. Also, as a white male, my thoughts are not wanted nor valid. To the point that I feel I have to post with a throwaway since I've already have folks I thought were friends and have known me for years question if I am a racist because I don't support looting/rioting.

orwin2• 6 years ago

You see, this is argumentative red herring. I could do the same for the other side (maybe not the "politics" point, but honestly i don't think this is even a point...). You should do the same work against what you think, you will be less polarized.

BTW: `Do not try to distract from the core message by talking about looting or rioting.`

I'm pro-protest every time there is one, even dumb ones like Civitas or others. Riots and looting and what's destroyed are the most interesting thing to understand. Yellow vest in France destroyed expensive and electric cars, bus stops, Velib stations. Anti-capitalists Black blocs destroyed Mcdonald's and banks. BLM destroyed small stores, community infrastructure... This is saying a lot about how they see themselves and who they're against. Do you think the same?

tracker12• 6 years ago

I've lost two friends in the past month or so... one very leftist, one very right leaning. I tend to be more libertarian, but pragmatic.

People tend to be tribalist in nature, you tend to lean into a group and that/those groups become your identity instead of striving to take things as an individual and respecting people as individuals.

We are all allowed to have our own opinions and perspective, and even discuss and debate their value vigorously. Where we tend to falter is when we lose respect for the people who are expressing opinions that we disagree with.

It's generally a combination of pedantry, anger, ignorance and disrespect for ourselves and others that leads to action in those baser instincts and reject "the other." In the end, we are worse off for it. It often feels like general discourse has been set back over a century in the past decade alone.

I try to concentrate on admirable personality traits in terms of those I would deem to support vs not about on level with policy opinions. Arrogance, corruption and hypocrisy are the big ones for me, short of that I'm willing to put up with just about everyone.

gnusty_gnurc• 6 years ago

It's tough being libertarian in that sense that there's very few people amenable to what you have to say cause it's (at least in my experience) always interpreted as something an enemy would say. As though since what you're saying doesn't obviously line up with the party dogma of whoever you're talking to, it just gets grouped into whatever's the polar opposite.

So I'd definitely agree that no matter who I'm talking to - liberal or conservative friends - they're assuming I'm left or right wing (the opposite of whatever they are).

tracker12• 6 years ago

It's definitely rough... I've literally argued against both sides depending on some nitpicky points. I generally get the sentiment either way, I just disagree on the approach mostly because they tend to encroach on individual rights.

People have every privilege to be an asshole so long as they aren't infringing on another's rights. But they all seem to want to infringe on other's rights.

_y5hn• 6 years ago

Treat online discussions as online, even among friends. You're never going to win anybody over, get over yourself. In real-life, you might be able to at least make a persuasive argument based on facts and supporting evidence, or even just charm. Online dialogue is just not suited to true understanding and hearing eachother out, but rather the opposite. Just observe the wild conspiracy theories that in normal discourse would never otherwise be allowed such prominence, if not for social media platforms and covert ad campaigns.

ojhughes• 6 years ago

In the UK we often use the derrogative term "snowflake" to describe people who are usually left leaning & perpetually offended. Judging by Twitter, there are a new generation of snowflakes who are even more offended and angry, they melt away at the first sniff of conflicting opinion.

Whilst I dislike the term, I think life is too short to spend time with people who take themselves and their opinions too seriously. I want spend more time laughing and less time debating.

orwin2• 6 years ago

I think this is a cultural thing. I have different view with my brother on pretty much everything but we still manage to find time to take vacation together. It makes pretty interesting evening after a slow, windless day. If people are interested he is really far left, i'm not (or i'm much, much further depending of your point of view).

I mostly don't care about my friends points of view. The only question you should ask them is : why do you think that, and the only question you should ask yourself is the same one. Unless you're really, really well informed, your point of won't be that interesting anyway. Interesting enough to post it on reddit or HN at most :)

If the conversation becomes to much for people feelings, take a tangent, talk about interesting philosophical point. Bias analysis is great too (check your own bias loudly to encourage people to do the same, it works). Do not hesitate to point that an argument is poor, especially if it comfort your views.

jptoor• 6 years ago

1. If a BLM post is all it took to "lose a friend," I'd reconsider your definition.

2. Not everything is about you. Your friends explicitly were not thinking about you when they picked a side.

3. You won't be convinced, but someone else may benefit from a tool I've used to get past this. Would you hold the same beliefs if you were born black in an inner city? Would you want the status quo in terms of police strategies? To be scared for your life at every traffic stop? It's easy to defend a stance from a position of privilege (directly opposed to "my safety".)

You can do the same for your friends with different political beliefs - most stances are based on someone's life experiences or environment. There's likely a reason they believe something, and it has nothing to do with you. If you grew up in their situation, or friends, or life experiences, do you think you'd still hold your same beliefs? Most of the time the answer for me is no, and therefore the beliefs have nothing to do with the person's character.

pieterk7• 6 years ago

Of course would a facebook post not change OP's mind. Other cultures can also have different definitions of friendship. They might even call American friends, flakes.

What is the definition of friend, if yours don't think of you when deciding to reallocate a quarter billion dollars?

I think there are no sides to this conflict. The system is in conflict with itself, and we're barely able to control it at this point.

thu21114• 6 years ago

I've got some friends with whom I disagree politically and we even regularly debate. In fact for one friend, our friendship has been maintained over the long term by regularly meeting for dinner and drinks, and often we end up having massive arguments about all kinds of topics.

Our secret is that we don't let it reduce our respect for one another, at the end of the evening we're always shaking hands and agreeing to meet again next week. It may also help that when we became friends we worked together, so we forged a bond of mutual respect through our work.

I have another friend who is a real SJW snowflake type (he got hired by Google, perhaps that explains it, he wasn't like that before). With him I don't tend to debate politics much because he gets genuinely upset. But we've also always come back and been friends again afterwards, and I've noticed he's sometimes gone off and researched whatever I was saying for himself and has questions. So obviously parts of it sunk in.

I think Facebook can be difficult because your default mental state is that all those people are "friends" even if maybe you haven't seen them for a while, or if your friendships have very different depths. The term friend is very black and white. Most people only have a tiny number of really deep friendships, often only one or two at most, I mean of the sort built on real long term knowledge of each other and which can survive genuine disagreement over divisive issues. You say "a fair number of my friends" which sounds like many of them probably aren't deep friends. They're probably more like friendships that were once deep, or who were party buddies, or who were former colleagues that you got along with etc. For them you'd probably be surprised to discover that if you started hanging out with them regularly for some reason, they'd get over it and you'd be OK.

webartifex• 6 years ago

why is this thread flagged?

xtiansimon• 6 years ago

"defend their values"

I've been trying to listen to others more in tough times like these.

I'm struggling to articulate my _perceptions_ of events from my neighbors and friends of color in NYC. I'm struggling to understand my opinion as just _one perspective_ my family member in CA, who is in law enforcement, has put on me.

I'm not worried about losing friends, nor family member's love, because I've been struggling to hear what they're saying and pushing them past what is generally comfortable conversation, but not to the point of flipping their lid (Oh, that doesn't move you? How about this! kinda stuff), or repeating my stand on hypocrisies (once is enough).

Let me put it this way. Can you maintain 5k friends with one-on-one personal interactions? No. Impossible. By the time you get to the end of that list, someone will have been married and had two kids. How about 1k friends? 500? 50? Are we talking about fluffy posts about kittens on Twitter? or highly divisive topics? Can you have meaningful and thoughtful interactions with 5 people which leave you both aggravated, exhausted, and heart broken? I can say at this point you won't be worrying about the party you're missing with 50 friends, but thankful for the friends you do have.

Ask HN: Is anyone else losing friends in droves?

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