So…did you goon?

imagine if everyone just went back to the social media of the 2000s. i would go back to vox.com when it was a blogging platform and not a news site.

-gestures wildly at facebook-

Same, but I also recognized that the people who wouldn't message me back were not people that I wanted to spend extra effort on communication with when they couldn't bother to respond to a text.

The people that matter make the effort, but many of us are concerned with the quantity of friends instead of the quality of the friendships. I have fewer people to talk today than I did on Facebook, but at least I actually want to talk to them instead of just going through the motions.

Just write an email

Just call them

Yeah no thanks

I'll just scan for their name in the papers.

And? You and I are online, right now, communicating across an unknown amount of distance, while you tell me having online friends means you need Facebook to keep in touch.

There are plenty of ways to communicate with people who aren't in your town. I have friends on the other side of the country, and a couple over in the EU, and I can communicate with them just fine and never touch Facebook. If you don't want to leave Facebook, just say it instead of hiding behind trivialities to excuse you staying there. I have plenty of friends who choose to give a pound of flesh to Facebook for one reason or another, but at least they admit they want to be there.

That's why I tell people to loosen up when they complain that the format is being misused. If it works, it works. It is evolution. I don't like the look of snails any less than the rest of the general population do, but snails evolved the way they did because it works.

I'm ok with a craigslist reboot. As long as we can bring back all the murders, drug dealers and hookers aka everything that made craigslist fun

No, hold on, those two things aren't remotely the same.

It makes sense to work out which kid belongs to which parent, for sure. For one thing, a whole bunch of the legal system is based on who inherits what when people die. You want some way to keep track of that. There's some weirdness about keeping track of the father rather than the mother, and some cultures keep track of both or of the mother first, which makes more sense, but that's a different conversation.

But "who's paired up with who"? Absolutely not. Why would it be more convenient to be unable to separate sexual partners from descendants? That is not a practical thing. And the stuff that's preserving, which is that women are historically treated like children without full legal autonomy and part of the stuff being managed by a paterfamilias, is fortunately no longer true.

And of course once that gets recognized enough that even a bunch of Christianity admits that not all relationships are forever and reintroduces divorce (after centuries of treating women like perpetual property of their husbands) it makes absolutely no sense to have half the population ping-pong between names over their lifetime an arbitrary number of times. It's not only logically absurd, it is actively inconvenient to both the first goal of pairing descendants but also administrative bookkeeping in general. I can only imagine the amount of public records errors induced by women changing their name a bunch of times over their lifetimes.