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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why people are so averse to unfriending people they don't talk to on Facebook. I'm down to few dozen "friends" on facebook because every couple months I go through the list and delete everyone I haven't spoken with or who is not relevant to my interests anymore. Also - no family friends, that's like rule number one.

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Every place has a culture, which has rules and expectations that don't depend on your own personal opinions. I would agree with GP that the culture of Facebook says that unfriending someone means something negative towards them.

Sure, it is negative, but if you didnt want to be friends with them (not even virtually), why would you be so crushed up about their feelings?

Because I would like to be an acquaintance, but facebook doesn't have that option. Crushing feelings of friendly acquaintances who didn't do anything wrong doesn't seem like a nice thing to do.

> Because I would like to be an acquaintance, but facebook doesn't have that option

It literally does have that option - go to their profile, click the "friend" dropdown, change it from "friend" to "acquaintance", see that they stop showing up in your feed :)

http://www.bewebsmart.com/social-media/facebook/use-the-acqu...

Unfriending someone on Facebook has negative connotations (at least to me and those I know). I take the alternate approach of adding them to the default "acquaintances" list, and share accordingly. I also unfollow a large percentage of my friends so my newsfeed isn't polluted. The tools are there they just take some effort to get in the right place.

> I also unfollow a large percentage of my friends so my newsfeed isn't polluted.

How does that work out for you? I could never get Facebook to give me a usable news feed. I unfollow friends, pages, like new pages, intentionally scroll through new pages and like random things in order to get its posts on my newsfeed, adding people as my "close friends", blocking random pages that are on my newsfeed for bullshit reasons ("John Doe and 2 other friends like this post") and I could still never get anything even remotely useful, neither by adding the data, nor by reducing the number of data.

The latest pitfall I'm having is "a video that you may like". It started appearing like less than seven days ago, and in every single example, it's just some bullshit video from a page that I have never liked, but have interacted with in the past once or twice.

My Newsfeed quality is pretty good I think, but I'm not doing anything that you aren't already. I did spend a lot of time hiding specific pages that friends would share (e.g. "Occupy Democrats", other partisan political things, anything ending in "Memes") - you click the little arrow, then Hide Post, then Hide All From $PAGE. I also added people I really care about to "Show First" in News feed preferences, which is different than the Close Friends list.

A large percentage of my feed is from pages for video games and tech companies/software. It's possible my interests align better with how they select stories for my feed than yours?

I totally agree. There are enough "open" social networks like Twitter and Instagram that are public by default, the point of being mutually authenticated friends on facebook only seems useful if you interact with that person in real life (or did at one time). Otherwise why not just make Facebook public by default like the others?

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