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Comment by muppetman | Hacker News Reader

The main problem this person faces but glosses over is the fact that they've added people they don't know. Why do that? It makes no sense and will only cause you to get annoyed.

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]

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The real problem with Facebook is the symmetric friend model. I have 70 FB friends and a couple of those would be removed if it were politically convenient.

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 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 be 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.

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.

It's trivial to remove someone from your update stream, but not remove them as a friend.

You find this? All I've found is it makes people all the more desperate for me to add them, as if I'm hiding some super social parties from them or something.

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!

I meant that it might be a personal shortcoming that I'm not able to be that blunt with people I have to see on a regular basis. I respect your system and wish I could carry it out, but for me, it's just something I really don't want to deal with. Whatever serotonin fix I would get from Facebook isn't worth it to me.

Agree. I've always tried to keep social network friends to below 100, and periodically conduct a review to ditch anyone who is no longer of interest. It seems that many people routinely have thousands of "friends", but I can't possibly have any meaningful relationship with such a large population.

Read the comments, the author specifically says that is not the case: I haven't added people that I don't know. I was just stating that I get tons of requests from people I don't know. I do, however, know people that accept just about any friend request.

When I posted my comment above, he hadn't replied to any comments. But yes, I can see now that he states clearly he knows everyone.

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