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Comment by paulcnichols | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, if FB was just me and my mom I'd probably get more value out of the site. Smaller radius is better IMO.

Pruning my friends improved my experience, but they grow back over time as people rediscover you or you make new acquaintances. I wonder if you could make a game or website that forced you to prune your facebook friends down, perhaps by looking at your social graph and telling you that you haven't messaged with a person in x years or something, or that you've never even "liked" something they posted. Some heuristics to determine who you really wouldn't miss. The problem with unfriending is that Facebook's UI makes it almost impossible to do in batches, and it feels kind of rude to "unfriend" someone, even though I personally wouldn't care if someone I don't talk to unfriended me.

Here's a trick to constantly pruning down your friends list. Don't worry about pruning down your whole list, just check the people who have birthdays every day you log in. I just checked; there was a single friend who had a birthday today, and I haven't had any contact with her in years. That makes for a nice easy prune.

Of course the downsides are that you risk disappointing someone who obsessively checks their friend count on their birthday, and that it only really works if you log in every day.

If you don't care enough to talk them in a year, then I doubt you care about "disappointing someone who obsessively checks their friend count on their birthday"

Agreed, and it's never stopped me, but a couple times I've told people that and their response was along the lines of "on their birthday? harsh."

You can't please everyone.

Good idea! Thanks for the tip.

I wish the Facebook API allowed for unfriending - I've always wanted to build a tinder swipe app for it.

Guess why it doesn't allow for it...

Oh I am aware. I've considered just building a browser plugin for giggles to do the same thing.

That's basically what I want. Outrageous that they don't allow unfriending via the API, but not unexpected coming from Facebook.

It isn't really outrageous when you consider their core business model and the value of keeping you in a widespread graph of people. Someone with some time could easily do it with a plugin manipulating the JS on their friends page though.

A game rewarding you for removing Facebook friends? Burger King did that years ago, got quite a bit of exposure thanks to it: sacrifice 10 friends, get a Whopper:

https://www.cnet.com/news/delete-10-facebook-friends-get-a-f...

A "friendship equity" feature of a combined decay rate (half-life) and boosting factor would be nice.

Remove other friends then?

I did this. One day I just decided to make my Facebook account family only - removed hundreds of "friends". It worked great for me. I don't idly check it so often (because there are fewer updates), but I still get to see what people I care about are up to.

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