Online Friends Are Real Friends

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Online friends are as real as sending racy photos then getting extorted for Google Play cards.