I remember the first time this happened a few years ago (probably like a decade or more), it seemed really strange and bizarre, but now Facebook seems to be the default way to find out someone you know has died, at least people roughly in my generation (young GenX). Not for close friends or relatives but for people you know somewhat, or used to be close friends with but have lost touch with.
Just found out my university housemate passed away last year. I had not spoken in decades and not even thought about him for years, then my wife mentioned something that made me think of him. I looked him up on Facebook and he passed last August. No idea how, his Facebook wall was all regular Facebook stuff, like pictures of holidays, then people tagging him in his memorial service. That was the second time in as many months I’d discovered someone I know died that way.
I guess pre-Facebook you just didn’t find out this kind of thing unless you spoke to someone who was closely connected to them enough to have been told. And of course Facebook seems to be dying a slow death especially among younger people, I don’t know if the replacements have the permanence and ubiquity of Facebook for this?
Yes, but that requires you to be actively looking for people who you think might have died.
Of course, this “Find out in a weird way” happened before Facebook. I had one friend that died, and several years later, at a party, I ran into another guy we’d both known back in the mid-90s. The first few minutes were awkward, as I tried to figure out if he knew my friend had died, and then having to tell him about it. And then a fight broke out! (Not between us )
I think his estimate is way off, as he didn’t (understandably) predict how Facebook demographics will change with time..
Young people have a much lower death rate than people in their sixties or seventies, but they make up a substantial share of the dead on Facebook simply because there have been so many of them using it
That’s very much not true any more I know very few young people active on Facebook they’ve moved on to other platforms and the average age seems to be much older now.
Yep. He talks about what if Facebook stops growing and starts declining in headcount. That pulls the dead>living date forward.
If that was also preceded by a few years of “only geezers sign up”, that’ll really pull the crossover date forward.
I don’t know anything about Facebook’s new user numbers for the last e.g. decade. Probably a spike from COVID, but a lull afterwards. Anecdotally I’ve certainly heard that, as you say, few people under 30 start using it or still use it, except occasionally to send a pic to grandma.
Is Facebook still signing up lots of users? And if so, how does that differ in the mature market of the USA versus the rest of the word?
My late wife had a small FB presence. I have no account there and never will.
When she died I looked up how to inform FB and convert her account into a static “memorial” account, just frozen in time. Which was a feature I learned about here.
They made the process far more difficult than dealing with her life insurance, her bank, her broker, etc. I gave up in disgust and her FB account still looks like she’s still alive.
I did log on as her (a violation of Federal law) and post a “Hi all, this is [husband]. I’m sad to report that she died on [date].” update. And I did, insofar as I could figure it out, disconnect her from any incoming feeds of other people’s news. She was still getting status update emails regularly from FB when I shut down her email account ~6 months later.
In your case, ISTM you could unfriend the decedent’s account and FB’d quit reminding you of them. It feels kinda weird, but no weirder than striking them from your XMas card list would have back in the day.
My HS FB group will show the obituaries of anyone that ever went there. So while that covers a lot of years and is usually people I never knew, every so often there is someone from my class or that I knew. I hate being at that age where people you knew are dying with some regularity, but in a way, at least I get to find out what happened to them in the last 45 years, because I haven’t seen or herd from them since the night of graduation. They were part of my daily life for four years, and then…nothing for 45..
My late mother had a FB account, which my sister set up for her. Mom rarely posted, but she enjoyed looking at the pictures and other stuff that her FB friends had shared.
Before she died, I made sure that I knew her password. When she passed, I logged in to her account and posted a link to her obituary. 30 days later, I closed the account.
If that was a violation of the TOS, I really don’t care.
If you lived in a small town, people often knew by word of mouth who died, and everyone would drop by the house of the mourners, bringing food and comfort. I saw this when I was a teen. People would come every day up the day of the funeral (several days were often allowed), and each time, they brought a dish. I have photos of tables groaning with food. In bigger towns and cities, there were obits in the newspaper, but even there, neighborhoods would get together and do as they did in small towns. I think Facebook a poor substitute for this, though, but better than nothing. (My High School has a memorial page, so I often hear about the decease of old friends through it, but it is run by a person who is determined to make the page about their Christian faith. Our school contained others of different faiths, as well as atheists. )
Yeah my university housemate’s death hit me hard. I had the same group of housemate’s all the way through uni at Manchester in the north of England, and we were very close. Even though most of us have lost touch since (the only one I am still in touch with is the one who also moved to the US)
It’s first death of a close friend for me, even if we weren’t close at the time
I was wondering about this. I guess they served the function of Facebook death announcements prior to social media. Have any dopers learned about the death of someone they knew personally from an obituary?
That’s how I found out about two deaths this year. Both were 66. Neither was someone I was close to, but still both people I esteemed. I plan on attending the second one’s funeral in five days.
Absolutely. I have found out the deaths of both friends and relatives through obituaries in the newspaper. Although, in the past few years, I have subscribed to the email notifications of death notices from several local funeral homes, which are more timely and thorough than the newspapers.
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