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This is called "splitting", or all-or-nothing thinking. It's a common psychological defense mechanism.

You don't just have friends and non-friends. It's a spectrum. By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's.

At the "far end of friendship spectrum", that is the closest form of friendship, there's no one there. Given enough obstacles that you yourself put up eventually you'll lose absolutely everyone.




"By raising the bar for reaching you some people no longer cared to be your acquaintances, and others remained connected but talked to you less frequently. And so you lose some of the contact that you had with other people because of your own actions, no one else's."

This is completely ass-backwards thinking. We don't have apps growing out of us and we are not doing things to ourselves "because of our own actions".

Leaving a bad app is a bit like leaving a country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop. You didn't decide to rape murder and pillage your neighbors, the corrupt leader did. Getting the hell out of dodge is an extremely reasonable thing to do, and you are not cutting yourself off from your acquaintances, the evil dictator is.

Besides, app messaging is completely backwards anyways, we invented protocols because they are the best way to reliably communicate.


If you leave a "country where a dangerous tyrannical dictator has set up shop" you will also almost certainly lose friends and acquaintances. And if you don't you won't. It's always heartbreaking for all kinds of refugees. But leaving, arguably, has more upsides, for example not getting brutalized by the internal security services.


I genuinely don't get how people manage to find excuses to talk to most people. Even before I left Facebook I mostly spoke to people face to face and when that became impractical I stopped talking altogether.




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