Online Friends

I'm going to be blunt: most of the people I count among my online friends aren't people I'd want to hang around in real life. They're people I talk to mainly because we both have accounts on the same site or something like that, and it's very rare that I think that I'd be friends with them if it wasn't for that context.

By the same token, most of my interests outside of writing tend to be fairly obscure, so it tends to be fairly rare that I have anything else in common with them. When your most mainstream interest outside of writing is Star Trek, you tend not to have a lot in common with people. But this is my problem, not yours.

It doesn't really help that a lot of the common online habits of people annoy me. A non-exhaustive list of online habits that annoy me include emoticons, "text talk" (stuff like say u or ur instead of you or your/you're), and bad spelling in general, especially when it's coming from people whose native language is English. I'm not exactly the easiest person to interact with online.

I certainly wouldn't give my online friends my number or street address unless we were exceptionally close. There's a difference between having faith in humanity and being an idiot, and this is where I draw the line between the two. Other people disagree with me, obviously.

Of course, I don't have an issue with having online friends. Some of the people I've met online have been quite nice, and there have been a couple that I think I probably would be friends with in real life if I knew them. Those tend to be rare though. It's just that I think my online friendships should, for the most part, remain online.