A friend I've known mostly online for 15+ years died this weekend. Our friendship started on an old gaming forum, but continued on Facebook.
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He was part of a group of friends, and we've all stayed connected via Facebook. He didn't post much, but he liked and commented a lot.
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I met him once years ago, and just two months ago he told me he'd love to host me and my family down in Portland when we got down there.
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I found out from a mutual friend on FB that he'd died, and had been hospitalized. I was shocked. I NEVER saw this in my feed. Ever.
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So I flipped to his feed, and sure enough, there'd been a post in November about him being in the hospital. I was never shown this post.
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Now, I'm a meticulous FB feed peruser. I always set it to Most Recent and browse until I see the stuff I saw last time. I keep up.
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Other friends have confirmed that they too never saw his hospital post. So now we're all horrified. We never knew to reach out.
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And worse, we never commented, because we never saw it. Did he die wondering if we cared? He didn't know, and we didn't know.
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All because FB's algorithm presumably decided that he didn't post much, so he didn't warrant enough attention in our feeds.
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So now today not only have I lost a friend, a bunch of us are horrified that we never knew, and we don't know if he KNEW we didn't know.
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