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I met my wife playing Star Wars Galaxies, online. She was member #4 in the guild I ran, The Trade Federation on Flurry, one of a whole crew of people I'd never met in my life. It was a very interesting way to meet, to get to know a person with zero real physical input, no pics (we're too old for that stuff), and we talked on and on about philosophy, life, kids, learning, loving, challenges. For a good while it was just the words, no idea what the other looked like or how old, none of the things you'd normally sort people on before you decide they're worth your time.
The reality is, with no face and no resume in the way, all you've got is the actual person, what they laugh at and how they handle an idea they don't agree with. And in an MMO you see even more, how they solve problems, do quests, handle loot, and deal with moving through the game. That turned out to be the part that actually matters, and it's usually the last thing you learn about someone you met in person, not the first.
At some point we made the leap; she was in Tennessee and I was in California, so meeting in person was a very big deal. I flew out and drove deep into Tennessee, and we met for the first time in a Food City parking lot. It was amazing, we talked for hours.
As they say, "and the rest is history." We married and have been together for 20 years. Meeting her, and a whole crew of people I never met in person but still call friends, is the primary reason I joined the team trying to keep SWG alive [1]. We both still have fond memories of our time together in game, and now in real life.
So when someone tells me online friends aren't real friends, I just smile, because I married mine. And yes, I'm married to a gamer chick, and it's amazing! And all these years later, she's still my friend too. :)
I met so many awesome people in SWG. It did a really great job of fostering social interactions in a real way, not just transactional menu button presses. To get a lot of things done in the economy and the different aspects of the community you had to talk to people. You were also part of a persistent universe, so you could frequent the same spots and end up bumping into people.
Just those two aspects I believe are where online games have gone so wrong, and it's an easy fix. Persistent servers instead of matchmaking, and don't make every little interaction a gamified polished system. Leave some room for the chatbox/voice comms to be relevant for getting stuff done.
This felt incredibly warm to read, thank you for sharing.
My son made online friends when he was 14, playing games together with them on Steam. When he is playing a game with them, I often hear him roar with laughter, but they can also be quite serious and talk about life and school. Last month, we took him to Wrocław to meet them, and it was marvelous. My wife and I got to know the parents of these boys (16-17 yo now), had dinner together, and we separated as friends. My son had a blast that week finally meeting them in person.
As an introvert, my best friends I still talk to today are online friends. We met a few times when I was teenager, but then we moved different places. Online communication still goes on.
He's a lucky guy that has parents that understand him.
I've been in a similar position 10 years ago when I was 16. I wanted to meet a bunch of friends from Arma 3, in Wrocław as well.
My parents didn't allow me to go. Years later I still hate them for it. I make sure they never know when I leave town now, since I'm not really in the mood to listen to my mom enumerating every way something bad can happen to me.
Let your fucking kid go. Especially when the kid isn't as retarded as you.
Had plenty of online friends come and go. What I found is that it usually took online relationships longer to get to know each other in some ways, and quicker in other ways.
It was no fun realizing after a few IRL visits that we really just didn't like each other unless careful email communications was our primary means of interaction.
With some folks the time it takes to write an email is all the filter is needed. Sometimes, though, it only takes 5 minutes IRL to realize that you only like the persons email - not the person, themselves.
> Sometimes, though, it only takes 5 minutes IRL to realize that you only like the persons email - not the person, themselves.
A great point that’s also true in reverse.
All online relationships are only for the good times.
You really need a friend in bad times, and then you'll find out who is really a friend.
Here's the problem with online relationships, you can pick them up and drop them whenever you like. You can do that in real life to a degree, but sometimes you are forced to confront friends in real life when you don't want to. A real friend requires surviving a degree of confrontation.
The OP article talks about people met online who they subsequently met and hung out with in person. To me, this is now an meatspace friendship, so yeah, it's "real".
Pure online relationships where you have never met or seen the other person are in my experience an order of magnitude less "real". As you note, there's no 'skin in the game' and ghosting a relationship is zero effort and likely zero consequences, and when everyone knows this is the case the relationships are equally less consequential.
This is the crucial difference. The online abstraction facilitates behaviors that are destructive to friendship, like ghosting, blocking, or even banning if you have admin powers in their meeting place.
Also, since real life is abstracted online, small issues tend to become dramatic because. It takes courage, and some recklessness, to open yourself to a total stranger that might not even be what they claim to be. For us who saw the initial anonymous wild west of the Web, it's difficult to trust people online. It might be different with younger generations that grew up with having their real identity open in several mainstream places.
I agree. Without seeing someone regularly in person or knowing their body language, mannerisms, quirks etc., I find the relationship to be much more disposable. There are people I was friends with in college that I only keep up with over text and those relationships are much more frail than they used to be.
I've experience that probably in the same ratio with IRL and Online contacts.
Sometimes people just go into different directions, it's sad but it's ok.
I've kept alive some online friendships from the bb forums, that I've met in real life a couple of times.
Similar to friends from HS, college or ex coworker friendships, sometimes interests change, they get into weird values you don't share or mature at a different speed than you. Sometimes it's just a logistics problem, it's hard to keep friends when you have a family, jobs and live in another time zone.
I've been ghosted by IRL friends as bad as with online friends. Outside of an awkward encounter in the mall or something like that, there is no real difference in that regard.
Maybe in isolation, although in most competitive video game spaces (which is where I've met majority of my "online friends") a disagreement between two parties tend to get resolve because it disrupts the entire dynamic.
It is increasingly difficult to just "drop" someone when you friends with their IRL friends, which is also pretty common. You'll play a game and meet someone, they'll meet you and invite their friend to all queue up.
I once read about a father who told his daughter, "real friends are people who care how your life ends up." I think that's a pretty good definition to go by.
I agree with this wholeheartedly. Embracing this change in what you value in relationships is a key part of growing up.
The shift from playing together (childhood) to having each others' backs (adolescence, college, 20s) to building up each others' lives (adulthood).
Your true friends have bigger dreams for you than you have for yourself.
> This will be the sixth time that at least one of us has traveled to hang out with the other.
Are these really online friends if you are also recognizing them as real-life humans that exist in the same world you do and treat them like you would any other friend? Aside from maybe the Amish (and even that's questionable if you pay close enough attention to what they are hiding), there is almost nobody who doesn't communicate with friends using electronic devices. That is not a unique property.
"Online friend" only seems like a useful distinction if you truly think of them as a some kind of nebulous chat entity that comes to you via a connected device, where specific implementation details be it human, AI, space alien, or magical fairy doesn't play into the experience. Where if you eventually found out that it was actually ChatGPT on the other end you wouldn't be disappointed.
The definitions seem kind of arbitrary, online friend seems to mean either:
1. friend who you primarily communicate online
2. friend where initial contact was made online
Option 1 seems odd, especially for friends who have moved. Are they reclassified as "online friend"? Option 2 represents only a single moment in time and seems to have little bearing on everything past that initial contact.
Also some people seem to classify "real friend" as "friend that I physically see on a regular basis".
I think having to travel (and doing it) in order to see people you initially met online is different from knowing people in your physical area and choosing to sometimes interact online instead.
Hard disagree. Online friends are easy to ditch. Real life friends are around wether you like it or not. That fact alone has huge repercussions.
Presumably that depends on the context in which your 'real life' friends see you
Real-life friends are ditching each other commonly these days, because the Block function on Whatsapp (or whatever app they use to communicate) seems so convenient and consequence-free.
Does this come from experience or?
My best friends are friends I made due to my software hobby when I was a child. Hard to find such group concentrated in my proximity at the time.
I still continue to talk and meet with them every once in a while even though we are continents apart.
My experience is real-life friends are more fleeting because you met them through geographic circumstances like school or work that change. Whereas your online friends are there no matter where life takes you.
Exactly. Perhaps OP was just lucky to never encounter any hardships that tested his online friendships before they moved to real life.
If someone you call a "friend" ditches you just like that. I think maybe you're too quick to call people friends.
Yes, online people can disappear, but I have online friends whom I've been talking to for the past 12 years (basically all the way back to when i returned to the social internet).
It's really all about trust and time, like any other friendship.
For online friendship to really work, we need to solve the problem of pig-butchering scammers (scammers who "make friends with you" and eventually get you to give them money somehow, e.g. by depositing money in a "crypto trading platform", sending money for a "health crisis", etc.)
This problem will only get worse with conversational AI agents/deepfakes/etc. For every human seeking genuine friendship there might be 100 AI agent scammers.
Use apps like Snapchat to ensure they are who they say they are (if they refuse to verify via snap or insta's snap feature don't bother with them). If they are not local delete them immediately if they ever ask for money or give a sob story, no matter how long you've been chatting! Protect yourself and don't be a fool as the Internet can be amazing on one side (have many chat buds on Snap and other apps who have verified themselves too and never asked for money) and horrible on the other side(i dont give any others a chance).
I think a more salient point is made here:
> "In addition, there's generally a lower chance that the friendship develops out of convenience alone. Don't get me wrong, many in-person friendships are born this way and can turn into the most meaningful lifelong connections."
I don't have any "online friends" at the moment, but if I did, I'd have met them in the online equivalent of my city, but not at work and not next door, not in highschool. On the extreme end of convenience, you have precarious, proximity-oriented, passive, almost lazy social activity; you meet the friends at work, and you might invite them to drive out to your bbq in the burbs where you've also invited the people next door and across the lane. On the extreme other end you have friends that occur despite every communication and proximity challenge being thrown in your way. Great friends come from mutual investment despite some level of inconvenience you both can tolerate, and it's my opinion that if the seeds of the friendship are planted only in the shallow soil of easy access, then the plant won't bear much fruit, and may be ripped out of the ground as soon a layoff rolls around.
I don't online friends as meaningfully distinct from the requirements of any other robust type of friendship. They're just formed in the ephemeral online equivalent of a cosmopolitan city. I have strong friendships in different pockets pf the city for different reasons in different circles, and don't think they'd all work well together in the same room. Some I climb mountains with, some I watch movies with, some I play video games with.
Online acquaintances meanwhile, are formed in one discrete silo of interaction and don't stretch beyond it, much like your nextdoor neighbor or coworker.
A counterpoint is that people - especially young people - who spend enough time on the internet to be willing to develop online friendships tend to be people who lack a proper irl social life, and (from my own personal experience) it is painfully obvious when you meet someone in real life who has grown up socialising primarily with people on Twitter and in Discord servers vs people who've had a more healthy balance.
Despite my best efforts to make it work, it's quite easy for me to see the contrast between people I've met from the internet and people who originated irl. The terminally-online people tend to have much higher rates of mental illness or be uncomfortably weird to be around. On the bright side, I've found this to be less true when socialising with people who I've met through those internet friends.
Additionally, internet friendships are more viable the less interesting and wholesome your life actually is. You can't start a band together. You can't share opinions on the taste of a meal unless it's from a multinational fast food chain. You can't walk through a forest together. You can't go on a bicycle ride on the trail near your house and share an equal level of genuine appreciation for how beautiful the nature looks this time of year, with full sensory experience. (Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH3D1cpm6do)
Sure, the internet could be a good tool to initially find people (if you're lucky enough to not experience the issues described my first two paragraphs), but for me the aim should be to transition to an in-person relationship as quickly as possible. I don't want my friendships to just be text on a screen, where every thought I express to them is monitored by the digital surveillance panopticon, where they could disappear and be replaced with ChatGPT and I wouldn't know the difference, where my friendship with them is on-hold if their house loses internet for a week and their cell phone reception isn't good enough to make video calls, where I can't give them a hug or offer to tidy their house with them or make any tangible, physical positive impact on their life.
I work fulltime and have 2 kids still at home by myself. I made my two best friends on MMORPGs, one on FFXIV almost 10 years ago now, and one in Black Desert just talking about black metal bands we both liked in server chat.
I have acquaintances IRL, mostly from work. But my actual friends are people who I've never met face-to-face.
I’ve never had online friends, actually. Never. I’ve been alive 40 years and I’ve never had an online friend.
There have been people I’ve met online, then go to know and befriend offline. There are friends offline, who I’ve kept in touch with online. But there is nobody I know solely online that I would consider a friend, and it would take a lot to change that. IRL is simply a different thing altogether for me. It’s hard to imagine making a ‘real’ friend without try at IRL interaction.
How do you make online friends? I’ve been on Reddit for many years and have rarely even DM’ed anyone. I’ve also tried apps like Boo but the conversations always fizzle out.
They used to be real friends. At this point, if you only know someone online, they might not even be a someone let alone a friend.
My wife's friends from her Minecraft server joined us on vacation the past few years. We have multiple people from all over the US and Canada meet us where we're going and we go do touristy stuff together.
I'm sorry, but this is like saying "online sex is real sex". I'm sure some people can get the same stimulation, but it very much isn't the same.
Humans need other humans, in flesh and blood in front of them. Bonding needs a physical presence. That's the only way our social processes have evolved.
Given the sociability crisis and how having online friends can still have benefits, it's fine to paint them as something good, but they shouldn't be mistaken for the real thing, and this sort of ideas hide away our unnatural modern lifestyle.
With my online friends there's a shared understanding that we'll most likely never meet IRL and probably wouldn't even like each other. It's like mutual parasociality, lol.
There are a couple people I've met on HN, then emailed with, then met IRL.
There are also some people I've known IRL, who then saw my stuff on HN and reconnected with me IRL.
The former is neat, but the latter is even better.
I have 3 long term online friends which I've kept in touch with for over a decade but I never met them offline (only 2 I met over video chat).
During covid I made a lot more friends and happened to interact people with all different backgrounds, and ngl this helped me alot in many ways
for me, the non-committal nature of online friends is nice.
the best online friends are the people I've known for 15 years, whom I just message two/three times a year for a deep conversation.
IRL friends have too much IRL mess of scheduling, meeting up, solving the issue that friend A really dislikes friend B now yet you need to fit them at one party.
I have a bestfriend who I met on mIRC, we are still bestfriends after 26 years later.
anybody got into the online to IRL issue where you pictured the person differently and it didn't survive the meeting ?
Rehab friends are real friends, but a person shouldn't ever want to experience the circumstances necessary to have rehab friends.
Is this reddit or hn?
Online friends are as real as sending racy photos then getting extorted for Google Play cards.