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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response. It's not putting a price on your relationship. It's technically the same answer they'd give a stranger, but that doesn't mean you're being treated like a stranger.

(I do think a slight discount often makes sense just because a friend is probably quicker and easier to deal with. But anything more substantial turns into asking for free stuff, and yes and no are both perfectly fine answers to that.)

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> If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response.

If a stranger walks up to you and asks for $100, you're unlikely to give it to him. If a friend does, there's a more likely probability that you will consider the request.

And depending on the relationship, you may expect for the money to be paid back (eventually), or you may not (considering it a gift). (Often the advice is to consider "loans" to family and friends as gifts in practice, as otherwise the expectation of repayment may sour the relationship.)

Sure you'll consider it. The point is you could say yes or no without being a bad friend if their reason for the money is "friendship I guess? *shrug*".

I don't know why so many people are acting like I said a "no" is the only acceptable answer.

That's the thing. This was a $3000 camera. A 20% friends discount is 600. We've been best friends for two decades, but most days he doesn't give me $600 on cash. Don't get me wrong, we don't keep track who paid for dinner or cinema ticket or whatever. But there IS a threshold at which it really becomes a random cash gift.

Yes dealing with friends is nicer than strangers - but also when you're selling stuff, sometimes it's better to do strangers. Expectations of long term service and support are clearer and have more defined boundaries.

I guess friendship means different things to different people. I've had friends spot me plenty more than $600 and I've spent thousands on friends in return. I can't imagine having such an indifferent attitude towards someone I care about.

"Spot you" implies you actually had a level of need for the money.

Declining to give you $600 out of the blue because you'd rather have more money is not being indifferent.

It can imply that, but it can imply other things too and you shouldn't draw conclusions from one interpretation. You've never just paid for a friend's dinner or ticket?

Perhaps this is a cultural thing. I routinely buy gifts for friends, pay for their meals, travel and vice versa. Having more money is not some supreme objective that is more important than the people around you. Money is just a tool for enjoying life. I come from an impoverished and deprived background, spent years homeless since I was a teenager, and I still recognize that putting money before friends is a scarcity mindset.

Gifts are nice but deciding not to give someone a gift out of absolutely nowhere is not "putting money before friends".

"deciding not to give someone a gift out of absolutely nowhere" as a matter of course, as a guiding philosophical principle, is categorically putting money before friends.

That's reading way too much into the earlier posts.

I'd say I'm reading into them the regular amount. Your entire premise is that you wouldn't just hand money to a friend for no reason. I challenged this mentality and whether or not such a friendship is ideal, offering a perspective into why there are more important things in life than money.

If this isn't your intent, you should reflect on how you've presented your argument.

I didn't say you have to say no, I said you can say no without any negative implications on your friendship.

I have no idea where you got saying no as a matter of principle.

Also if saying no is putting money above friendship then so is the friend asking for money for no reason!

> I have no idea where you got saying no as a matter of principle.

right after this yous say:

> Also if saying no is putting money above friendship then so is the friend asking for money for no reason!

No, it isn't, and the fact that you see it that way perfectly illustrates the point I've been trying to make.

To be clear, I don't think either of them is putting money above friendship.

But you haven't explained why you think sometimes saying no is a problem. You said a thing about philosophical principles but I've explicitly told you that's not what I meant. So it's hard for me to make this comparison without knowing what you mean.

Obviously sometimes saying no is a problem. But, the user I responded to, and you to a degree, seemed to, intentionally or not, use this "sometimes" as a lever for "anytime". To be clear, my original criticism is meant for NikolaNovak and his friend's unwillingness to sell something to him at a slight discount. They initially say "slightly less" but later say "20%", I'm unsure which is the real number, obviously the perceived value of a high percentage discount does not scale as linearly.

You replied, saying "Declining to give you $600 out of the blue because you'd rather have more money is not being indifferent," and so I responded to this and your earlier comment, "If you ask your friend for $100 for no particular reason, just because you want $100, that's an annoying request and "no" is a reasonable response," because I disagree with it as framed.

Since then, you have widened that argument to give it more support, and we can now both certainly agree that there's nothing wrong with saying no to a request for money/gifts from a friend. And we can agree it would be annoying for a friend to constantly ask that, or even to ask a single time in certain contexts without sufficient social capital.

I understand your intended meaning might be different than how it came across to me, and said, "If this isn't your intent, you should reflect on how you've presented your argument."

I mean no ill intent and don't want this to devolve into an actual argument, so it's probably best we wind it down. If I came across as judgemental, I apologize, for my part I was attempting to offer my own perspective on what friendship can mean to different people.

> But there IS a threshold at which it really becomes a random cash gift.

Not wrong, but it is also possible that the $600 'cash equivalent' discount would be considered a birthday or Christmas present, or a form of 'repayment' for the time he helped you out with the Thing with the Guy in the Place. (“I'd never been to Belize.”)

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