The Facebook Cull | Hacker News Reader

The Facebook Cull

newstilt.com

66 pointsjgrahamc29 comments

But now I’m down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal life. Details of my family, my travels and my thoughts that were too sensitive to broadcast to just anyone are now fair game.

Until Facebook decides at some point that those too should be public. I try my best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all private. At some point I don't think they will be anymore.

I try my best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all private.

This should be the attitude for putting anything online. If it's posted online I find it best to just assume that it is, or will become public at some point and base if it should be posted on that.

I try to do the same, but sadly without seeming rude and asking friends to remove you from photos or leaving you out of messages, you leave it to chance.

For instance, I've never put a photo of myself online, yet Facebook has me tagged well over 300 times from going out to bars with friends. I'm ok with my friends seeing these since they actually know me, but I can't control the privacy settings on their albums -- only whether or not people can get to those photos from my page.

I don't walk around with the uneasy feeling that, at any time, I could be photographed and unknowingly put online... but I still think about it from time to time.

Why are you bothered about people seeing you in photos?

> But now I’m down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal life

I see my "lucky 35" in real life quite often, and can tell them personal things in person, where it becomes a conversation. I'm not sure why I would ever need to share personal things online.

After all, the reason people become "online friends" to begin with is that you don't see that person enough in real life to maintain a friendship. If you really need to tell one of these pseudo-friends (or far-away family) something personal, there are many avenues for that, including email and the phone.

What you're describing is personal choice to not use social networks as a form of primary communication.

I know too many people in Portland to keep in touch with them all in person, via phone, or email, but Facebook is a great way to see the great stuff people are doing with their lives and share mine.

Your definition of friend may be weekly face time, but for many that live in an urban setting, it's simply impossible. Doesn't make them any less of a friend, though.

Maybe we have different definitions of 'personal'. I was talking about posting things about your relationship status or medical conditions... the only people I would tell that stuff to anyway are the "lucky 35". I'm not saying avoid social networking all together. Facebook is, like you said, great for keeping up with acquaintances. But you don't share personal stuff with acquaintances anyway.

Hmm Facebook's previous attempt at something similar (Beacon) did not go over well and then there is Google Buzz, which after a month and half I turned off. Found Buzz to be annoying(especially all my IM status updates being made public and being saved in my sent folder) and my friends did not use it

Yes, if he posts personal information, he has to trust Facebook, but he also has to trust those 35 real friends.

Of course malice isn't an issue, since they're real friends. But friends aren't always security-conscious with their computers. Someone might borrow his friend's computer and find that it's still logged into Facebook, or that the browser stores the credentials. Someone can sneak a peek while his friend looks at personal information in a cafe. The more real friends are added, the more likely this becomes.

If you do plan on removing friends rather than using FB lists and organizing permissions based on lists, I would suggest going to http://www.facebook.com/friends/

It allows you to click X next to each friend rather than going into each individual profile to remove them.

Specifically, the list including all your friends, and none of your other 'connections':

http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp

I thought I'd try this out to see how it felt. Using only the criteria "do I care about what this person is doing today?" I managed to axe 122 people, and don't feel bad about it at all.

I chose to cull facebook instead. No regrets.

Yeah, I'm doing that today as well. I'm going to miss the photos, but FB trying to sell my info to everyone is getting old. I wish there was some sort of federated social network, where everyone could provide their own lists of friends and activity streams (i.e. http://activitystrea.ms), and clients I authorized through openid/oauth could read it. Use pubsub for updates, some sort of common JSON or XML representation for users and their graphs...

Just remember we're all outliers here.

Everyone else in the world is on facebook, addicted to farmville, posting stupid comments and uploading bajillions of photos.

When you remove yourself from things you lose potential to make money/build businesses/etc etc. idk I think if you're doing anything that targets "average people" you should do some of the things "average people" do, so you know their pain points, what could improve things etc.

Personally I find it really useful for keeping in contact with friends + family. Far better than anything else I've found anyway.

I think this has become the "I don't even own a TV" among those who don't even own TVs.

But basically same for me. I rarely go to facebook anymore. But new messages get emailed to me, and they have that neat feature where you can just reply to the email and it posts it to facebook. No need to even visit the site!

I use the same tri-level distinction- Facebook for people I know and talk to regularly. Linked-In for People I know through Work. Twitter for everyone.

I also use twitter as my base-level feed; It inserts into Linked In and Facebook, so people don't need to pay attention to all of them; The public things trickle up.

I believe that Facebook would prefer that we solve this problem by using friend-lists. With lists, you can say "Push this update only to members of my family", or "Only show this to my D&D Buddies"

While I've experimented with that a bit, too many things are too granular, where they are only showed to all-friends, or nothing.

For now, having the firewall of separate services serves me well.

I've been trying this for a while and intend to write a nice post about tweaking friends' lists on Facebook. In summary, I created two lists:

1. One for people who "can see everything" (that's the name of the list actually) and that's where I keep my closest friends. They have access to everything I share.

2. Another for people who "can't see anything" (again, that's its name) and that's where I keep people who I can't avoid adding as friends but I don't want them to see anything I share, think big company's partners who wouldn't like me to reject them.

Everyone else is not on a list and they can see my profile and photos but won't see my status updates. There's people from school days whom I have no connection besides that and don't deserve to keep them updated on my life but I still want to keep their contact.

I've done this recently as well. That, or I've hidden status updates from various pseudo-friends. It's nice to reconnect with that person from high school... for a while, but then I really don't want to hear about their personal lives. Perhaps we need multi-level friendships in Facebook, as in, friends vs. acquaintances? Though I guess if someone friends you and you only "acquaintance" them, things could get ugly.

Isn't that what lists on Facebook are for?

You can actually define groups of friends and then set permissions based on those groups.

No matter how close your FB friends I suggest not posting anything you wouldn't say in a public forum. Electronic communications can come back to bite you, friends can share your posts and FB saves literally everything. Note, this advice isn't limited to FB. It applies to email as well.

Reminds me of some advice from my intro to law class in college: The "e" in e-mail stands for "evidence".

You can hide people from your news feed. You can also make a list of friends and the default publishing privacy setting so only that list can see things. There is no need to break the connection.

With the type-ahead in composing messages and the search, you don't need to look through a list of friends.

Also, if you never pay attention to people, the algorithms on various parts of the site will make it so their content doesn't bubble up as much, even indirectly. An example might be the games presented in the gaming dashboard http://www.facebook.com/?sk=games

At first I read this post and thought it was a pretty good idea. Upon further consideration, I reconsidered this comment:

It was a surprisingly hard thing to do, but now I’m left with 35 people that I actually know: people I’d actually talk to in the real world.

Personally, if my Facebook was:

Family: over 35 - my mom, stepdad, stepmom, 3 siblings, about 10 aunts and uncles, 3 grandparents, about 15 cousins, and 2 in-laws

Might-as-well-be-family[1]: about 15 more

Friends I enjoy hanging out with... weekly: probably 10 more, monthly: maybe 20 more, a few times a year: at least 40 more

People I rarely see but chat with occasionally when I see them on Facebook: another 30?

That means that my culled Facebook list would still have at least 150 people. Once you have that many friends, what's a few more even if you don't know them that well?

I'm not in any way trying to brag about how many friends I have. In my experience this is pretty much standard for people in the 18-28 age range (I'm 26). It seems to me that the author's "lucky 35" being that small is the exception, and for most people such an exercise would be mostly pointless.

For me, Facebook isn't only for "people I'd actually talk to in the real world," anyways. It's also interesting to check out the profiles of people you knew several years ago but never talk to anymore, just to see what they're up to these days and maybe post "Hey, longtime no see! Glad to see you're doing well :)" messages on their walls.

And when it comes down to it Facebook is all about being social. Part of that is photo-sharing: if you want to tag -- or be tagged by -- someone you see occasionally (we all party sometimes, right?), you have to be friends with them. Ditto if you want to invite them to your next big party, or suggest they check out a small band that you enjoy. And it's pretty awesome when you can make your status "driving out to <interesting place 6 hours away> this weekend, who's with me?" or "looking for a ride to <hometown 2+ hours from my college town> Friday" and be reasonably likely to get a reply.

I agree with the idea of having a special network for your closest friends and family. I just think that if you're using Facebook for that, you're vastly under-utilizing its potential.

[1] My closest friends, past roommates that I still care a lot about, my ex-but-longtime-girlfriend's family, extended-extended family, etc.

Sounds liberating, but still too much politics I think. I prefer to just rarely rarely post to Facebook.

Same. Facebook's a giant, constantly-changing mess. I use it to contact people whose email I don't have and for nothing else.

I would fix his public-vs-private status dilemma by having a public Twitter account and a friends-only Twitter account.

I think there's some irony in only allowing comments with FB connect.

I did this from the start.

Facebook: Friends. People I actually know in real life LinkedIn: Work colleagues and acquaintances Twitter: Random geeks who want to follow tech stuff

I don't need to cull anything because I never allowed Facebook or myself to build such a fake list of friends and relationship to begin with. However, even with only close family in your list, FB (or any other service besides the email service you trust) is not worth sharing anything that is of private nature. Ultimately, FB is as same as any other place on the internet.

I use FB's private nature of service for close family and friends only to email them as it is convenient.

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