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Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

The DOI links aren't working so I can't read the study but I think there's a simple explanation, that also belies the headline. It may be that the typical number of close friends is now 0. But as people no longer even have any concept of close friendships, they're considering 'lesser' relationships as close friendships, because it's all they know.

This is made even more likely if they didn't define the term and allowed 'online friends' to be counted as 'close friends.' And I strongly suspect this may be the case since the graph shows a major inflection point in the increase of friends being 2007, the exact year when Facebook started becoming massive.

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So this would boil down to "social media increases polarisation". Quelle suprise

Feels true. People have a larger number of less-close friends.

Social media has taken over a lot more of young people's social life than it used to. Parents don't want young people to leave the house and play outside, so kids spend the time online. These patterns may persist into adulthood - hard to say.

My whole life is on the internet

We've become a family

We have never met

This is life inside the machine

Give me another hit of dopamine

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhQW0ufJRBQ

Yeah I'd like to see a follow up with the depth of friendships compared with pre-social media ones.

How could one compare depth of friendship of even two current friendships, let alone of current friendships with historical ones that are only accessible through people's mutable memories?

I'd assume this was measure previously, maybe im wrong, but it seems like something you could and would have been measured in the past.

But how can you measure except subjectively, and how can you compare subjective measurements when the whole point is that people's very idea of the meaning of phrases like "close friendship" have changed?

Its not my area, but apart from the the person subjective opinion there would be indirect ways to measure it. again I'm just guessing without looking around.

I can't find this study even searching for the author's name and the title. FYI, the cited author Stefan Thurner has published 73 articles in peer reviewed journals in the past 3 years (all of the ones I glanced at appeared to involve statistical correlations), so they are very prolific.

An entertaining insight into the thought process of adding epicycles.

What do you mean? I have hundreds of friends on Facebook. /s

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