How do you make friends on here?

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I have no shortage of friends and boyfriend at the moment. Got to know them via WP.

PM is a good start to making friends, but I don't think it's necessarily related to friends.
I just sometimes want to have some quick exchanges that are more informal or less public. Or some conversations are almost hard to think other users will be interested/good at, so I avoid taking up public space.

To be honest, if there isnt something special to do it for, PM's are a waste of time. If you have something to discuss you better share it publicly, so you can receive opinions of the whole community, not just 1 person privately. I can tell if someone handles a private conversation in PMs with somebody, sometimes they become friends, but yes, its not necessarily related to friendships only. I think some bored people do that to deal with their boredom. But PM's generally seem to be useless most of the time... to the extent, if PMs wouldnt exist, it wouldnt be a big deal. Except maybe, the only useful situation is if you gotta report somebody privately, and you gotta PM a Forum Moderator. I never had to do that, but if I have to, it would be in a PM, for sure.

When I speak publicly, I am responsible for the content, as well as maintaining privacy, and taking cultural differences into consideration. This often exhausts me.
Sometimes I have some collection of extreme statements of other people to check, and if I don't explain the whole context, this may lead to inappropriate assessments of my fellow citizens by other readers. And I don't have endless time to explain all cultural backgrounds, so it's more appropriate to only discuss with people who have some basic knowledge.

And some other sensitive topics are not suitable for public. When something is too different from the prevailing perception in the community, it's easy to have someone unfamiliar/strongly opposed to take the discussion in other directions that I don't always need.

Last edited by SkinnedWolf on 19 May 2022, 5:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

I can understand your point of view. But for me, if there's a sensitive topic I wouldnt want to talk about in public, I wouldnt talk about it in PMs with anybody either - because nobody on here needs to know. But such topics are quite obvious and might even be rare, I protect my privacy / personal life of course but I rarely ever encounter a situation similar to this.

To conclude this up, I would say, PM's can be useful sometimes, but I dont think I personally ever need to use the feature so frequently. And it wouldnt be the end of the world for me, if the feature didnt exist, but actually, its more like an extra feature meant to provide more privacy about topics you dont want others to see, and for me, thats a rare situation to be at, I guess.

Just an analogy, some of the more professional quick exchanges I prefer to do with "peers" so that I don't have to explain all kinds of jargon again and again or cause misunderstandings unintentionally.
Otherwise you can easily waste time again and again on reaching a basic consensus instead of doing any deep new exploration.

At some point when I'm undecided, I even need PMs to ask if this is acceptable in Western society, so I can be sure if certain issues can be discussed with everyone.
At other times, like opinion polls, I need to ensure that the opinions I gather do not interfere with each other.