The Decline of Facebook As A Social Network
jimlastinger.com
jimlastinger.com
I am quite proud of the fact I only have 100 FB friends, because I know each and every one of them. I lot of people I know from IRC and work refer to me as the Facebook Nazi because I won't add them, but they're not really my friends and I don't want to know what they're doing at 5am in the morning.
Toughen up a bit, delete those people you added because you know a tiny bit about them and things'll become that much easier to deal with.
This is exactly like the "Oh I get SO MUCH email" posts and then you find out the person signed themselves up to 50 email lists, 20 "email me when you get a new comment/status" things etc. Don't sign up for crap you don't want, it's that simple!
[Edit was just spelling fixes]
Maybe it's a personal shortcoming, but this is the main reason I still don't have a Facebook account. I don't want to have to explain to people I have to see every day why I don't want to be Facebook buddies. It causes awkwardness in real life, and getting status updates form people I actually like (but still might not care where they ate dinner last night) isn't worth the hassle.
I don't find it awkward to tell people "Sorry but I only add people that'd let me sleep on their couch at 5am in the morning" - in fact it often makes them feel awkward usually because they don't want to admit they'd not let me in!
Twitter does it so much better.
I wonder if the FB gods ever run statistics of how many people are "friends" and have mutually hidden each other.
I imagine it's harder if you're even just a little bit internet famous, but most people aren't.
Def not the end of the world.
It was once nice, simple, succinct. A 'phonebook with pictures.' Now, it's sterile and noisy, and not even useful as a phonebook.
[Edit:] This persistence of data I feel drives and encourages the issue the author describes - friending people you don't know just to see what they're doing (and to gain access to their photos, et cetera). There's a simple and obvious solution to the 'complete strangers' issue, but I don't feel that is the real problem.
Drama and politics variously meant that I had to accept requests from people who posted far too many meaningless status updates. Blocking, hiding, muting etc. don't work when you need to respond to 1 out of the 100 posts they send your way.
If it was possible to filter, mute, mark-as-read on a programmatic basis as it is with email (Love gmail filters...), I might not have been forced to delete my account.
People can't take it personally when you delete your account, but not friending, unfriending, hiding, or blocking can all be considered personally offensive actions.
Facebook and twitter, in the initial phases of their global boom (after facebook moved out of it's college/university paradigm) was used as a global social networking tools by geeks, bloggers and web designers. People who have a very different look on how the internet should be. And even though these people 'make' most of the obervable internet (read: web), it is important to know that facebook also caters a whole lot to the social networking junkies who love the loads of like buttons, and a rush of social media. While some of may think it is lame, it is rarely a question of lame or cool, but what keeps the site running.
Either ways, these articles seem to offer quite a narrow demographic when they try to provide any insight or an opinion. And that is because, 'Facebook users' today is a demographic so large that it approximates quite good to the law of averages. Above and beyond, my only point is that, only time will tell.
But that's part of why I'm bothered (and I think the source of all the wishful-thinking decline of FB stories). Well, that combined with: I don't like FB. I don't like the UI, I don't like the weak/ambiguous/unclear privacy policies, I don't like the narrowness of vision, the constraining of expression, the shallowness of engagement, the walling off of a portion of the internet, and I don't like the corporation.
I don't like FB, so I don't use it. But I do understand that it provides some utility to a lot of people. I want FB to "die" so I can have that utility without all the baggage or constraints.
Back when Facebook was new . . . the friends that you had were people that you actually wanted to keep in touch with.
That's still the case with me -- I only make friends with people I want to keep in touch with. The friends you have may have changed in character . . . but I find that hard to parse as Facebook's fault.
It seems to me that regular prunings and a less promiscuous friending policy would solve your problem.
Facebook spams you if someone has your email address in their address book. Facebook spams you if someone wants to be your friend. Facebook spams you if someone has a birthday. Almost half of my Facebook spams are in Spanish, and I don't speak Spanish.
And I have six friends in Facebook. Six. I can't imagine how bad it is if you have 100.
"Personally, it feels like my Facebook stream is becoming an email inbox. I get a lot of messages, a few of them matter to me, and there are lots ... that are just spam."