Man that last paragraph sent shudders down my back
A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
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Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#32Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era. You don't need to reach out to your friends anymore, instead, we just consume each other's broadcasts.
This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.
Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you".
Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#33This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.
Any suggestions on how to actually do this?
There are several services of varying levels of service, but honestly it's not that hard to write up a small script to fire off an email to get you to turn off the switch for a month. After multiple failures it assumes you are dead and sends a payload email to a trusted friend.
You can easily prepay up a good sum on most hosts, aws, digital ocean, etc. plenty of good low-cost mail apis too, like mailgun.
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#34As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.
You can actually have a Facebook "friend" marked as deceased (in quotes, because it's actually pretty stringent on how to make this happen, and you have to be family), which prevents them from showing up places like feeds and likes and search. I had to have my grandmother marked as deceased, and it was one of the most difficult parts of the posthumous clean up tasks.
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#35As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.
I wonder if there's a way to set up a "I'm dead" message that would post when you're dead. I dunno, maybe have an app check the SSN/NID status to be 100% sure, then post a prerecorded message...
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#36As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.
A story from a friend:
His friend died and all of his accounts went silent along with some grieving notes.
Then, a few months later, the deceased's account was compromised by a spammer. Posts from a spammer posing as a dead friend is about the worst kind of spam I can imagine.
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#37This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.
Any suggestions on how to actually do this?
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is what I wrote years ago to do it. Make sure your messages don't scare people too much, in case you forget to check in/don't get the emails, though.
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#38As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.
There is a subfield of HCI entirely dedicated to thinking about the problem of death in the 21st century.
Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatosensitivity
The seminal paper: http://www.chi2009.org/altchisystem/submissions/submission_m...
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#39I have a friend who died a year ago and I still keep her in my Gchat. I don't want to remove her.
Re: A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.
Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you". Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.
I agree. Now change the tile of this article to, "A distant friend died two years ago and I didn't know about it." And no one clicks.