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Comment by pstack | Hacker News Reader

Or, instead, think of this as a way to stop being an attention whore and instead of having 19,000 "friends" that you broadcast every thought and event in your life every day, consider it a way to be more discrete and thoughtful. Beginning with who you feel necessary to include in your "social graph".

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Perhaps a more appropriate first step toward stopping being an "attention whore" is discerning your audience. I would be very surprised if your post is very useful advice for most of the people here.

Just add them to a "facebook" circle and then when they come on slowly reallocate them to new circles.

Not everyone is an attention whore and some have met many people like coworkers, friends, travellers, etc.

I agree that not everyone is an attention whore, but if they have enough people that they need to use social networking with that they have to bulk-load them, then they probably are. My contact book is enormous, but I don't need a social network for most of those people. I don't need to update my coworkers on anything outside of work and I doubt businesses are using social networks for their employees to conduct business with. I certainly don't need to do social networking with someone I might have had a meal with while on a trip oversea, either. Keep them in my address book. Drop them a note sometime. Sure. But the number of people a non-attention-whore needs to interact with on a basis frequent enough to justify being part of an actual social networking application surely must be well below the "bulk loading" number?

The step of categorizing your social networking broadcast channels into proper groups has been years overdue. That's a great feature. I'm just saying that maybe people should pause and take a minute to actually do with Google+ what they originally intended to do with Facebook. You know, four or five years ago when the whole world switched over to Facebook, because it was the place you only "friended" people that you actually knew as opposed to "everyone with a pulse" that you friended on MySpace? Seems like everyone let that get away from them (and they frequently complain about how exactly that has happened to them). So instead of rushing back into the same situation, it's a great time to rethink how we're using such a service.

If I want to use bulk-import to move contacts to a more discreet sharing service, doesn't that make me the opposite of an attention whore? I doubt that most people with many contacts have acquired them for the specific purpose of seeking attention.

Problem is, Facebook is pretty much business card level today. You don't really exchange email addresses with someone you met socially, nor phone numbers: facebook is better at this.

So it's definitely not that I want less people in my friend list, just that I want to be able to easily limit what they see about me.

Some of us are already doing this on FB. I have about 200 FB friends, they are all people I know and like.

I don't know how those people with super high friend counts manage to eke any utility out of FB, unless they're trying to sell something.

I don't know how those people with super high friend counts manage to eke any utility out of FB

I don't have a super high friend count on FB, but I've set up privacy levels on the friend groups I have created. I'll usually accept a friend request from anyone I know, and then add that person to a friend group, with appropriate privacy levels. A person with a large friend count could do the same thing.

I'm surprised that more people don't use this functionality on FB, but then again categorizing is fun for me (and a lot of other geeks, I presume).

I just don't feel like I can trust any privacy settings in FB. In addition to being complex, even for a technical user, when one of my friends comments on a picture or status update of a non-friend, I can see that non-friends picture or status update. This is a huge privacy hole. Also, do you use FB groups or lists?

I think that setting visibility of pictures and status updates to "friends only" should hide them from non-friends. Yes, I meant lists, not groups.

This whole conversation is a demonstration of why FB's group support is insufficient.

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