## [t3_q2lp7s](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/q2lp7s/i_fear_social_media_has_ruined_the_social_fabric/)
Imagine meeting someone in person, you’ve had such a great interaction with them, the energy you shared — the conversation, it all was beautiful. You exchange numbers or an email. You come home, you contemplate how good the day and how weirdly, somewhere in October, you’ve bumped into someone and it went well. You sleep.

This was the 90s.

In the 90s, when you met someone, you exchanged contact, not social profiles, so to contact them, or they contact you, both parties had to make a deliberate effort. 

Technology back then, was a tool to connect and hear me out, connect to the same interaction — the same medium, in-person talking. Sure you shared a few emails, but ultimately you wanted to get back together to the old cafe where you left.

No ambiguity. Space to grow.

Fast forward to today, you meet, you exchange social profiles — let’s take Instagram for example.

In my life, whoever I have met through Instagram has always ended up in an ambiguous and awkward friendship, and ultimately becoming a poison.

You meet them, they meet you. Exchange socials. Hit follow on profiles. Come back home, sleep.

And from there, everything is downhill.

You see their stories, they see your stories. It continues. Days. Weeks. No interaction, no energy. Never get to know each other. The awesome interaction you both had, what went wrong?

2 months later with no messages exchanged, both are silently watching stories and posts of each other, and ultimately, you hit unfollow. The person you met was lost.

And believe me when I say this, this is a pattern I noticed and almost all the people I exchanged my social with (especially IG) when I first met them, and followed ended up just placeholders, not friends.

What social media seems to ruin, is that it takes the connection, and makes the connection poisonous by constantly exposing each other to the point the connection that was once a beauty of the offline, goes online, killing the mystique and killing empathy.

In the first timeline, you weren’t exposed, there was distance, there was anticipation. No ambiguity. No interaction override.

I feel truly sad writing this but lost many good people by just following them, wish I had gotten to know them before subscribing to their life that I never wanted to be the audience of, but a part of.

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submitted to [r/Stop spending life on the net.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stop spending life on the net.) by [u/goblinpack](https://www.reddit.com/user/goblinpack)