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Comment by matsemann | Hacker News Reader

I posted a lot on facebook in high school. Had maybe 50 friends there, like my classmates, soccer team etc. Posted at least once a day what I was doing, same did everyone else, and we discussed in during lunch next day. Or I would post a general "going to the soccer field, just join in", and we'll be a group there. Then joining university and getting new groups of friends, it didn't feel relevant to "spam" everyone with these things anymore. And then friends and family joined. Then I got a job and new groups, and suddenly there's 500+ friends on there I don't want to tell everything to...

And the opposite problem with people I follow on social media. I care about your tech writings, or your sport performances or whatever. But not everything else you post. I want a slice of you, not everything.

Hence, silence.

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This makes me wonder if something like Google+ "circles" or the idea of maintaining a finsta could translate into a way to bring back posting on social media.

I think what Google+ got wrong is that connections are a 2-way street, you may not realize your new friend _wants_ the day-to-day updates and soccer game invites, because to you they may just be someone you met at work.

Imagine if you could have a list of feeds to follow, personal, professional, etc. And when adding someone you could follow whichever feeds you wanted, and unfollow certain ones at any point. Some could be private, so you'd have to be approved to follow.

Then I wouldn't feel the need to remove old acquaintances from fb, I would just unfollow their feeds. I would feel comfortable posting stuff related to my job/networking because I know only people following my professional feed would see it. And I'd be comfortable posting personal stuff to my personal feed if it was locked and I was the maintainer of who could follow it.

They could pretty easily implement this in facebook and I could imagine it breathing life back into the platform.

I remember the circles concept working for about 2 weeks.

I'm into photography and people started creating "best photographers" circles, one of them had 700 posters in it. You could follow the entire circle with a single click after which your feed is pretty much done.

A handful of circles would be massively followed which means whoever was lucky to get in early, ruled the platform or niche.

Relatable.

My idea is that a profile should indeed be sliced. Personal, professional, specific niches (cooking, tech, whatever) and that we have a reliable labeling system that accurately detects the "channel", preferably fully automated. The signal to noise ratio would improve drastically and you could once again get value out of a social network.

Likewise I propose the same for moderation. Let me pick my comfort level. Ranging from "give it to me raw" to "I need to call my therapist because I saw a micro aggression" and everything in between.

Why not remove these persons you don’t feel close to from your friends list ? When I was using facebook, after I moved in life, say going from highschool to university and my list grew with my new university acquaintances there, I pruned it from the acquaintances of the past life, high school people I knew didn’t matter so much to me once they were not part of my life anymore.

So my friend list organically went through cycles of growth and shrink and probably stayed roughly constant, with the only long term growth being people that "sticked around" in my life.

Because I kinda want to keep up with their big events. Like kids, marriages, jobs, a new house or whatever. And I see some of them occasionally when "back home" and then it's nice to have kept somewhat superficially in touch. And fb works for that. It's just all the day-to-day stuff no one posts anymore.

There's also the unspoken norm that un-friending someone is rude. I frequently prune my following lists and then I run into someone I've met and imagine them getting slightly upset that I have unfollowed them. Maybe that sounds silly, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of my peers would say similr things.

The way that we describe the action, "un-friending", probably influences the notion that it's a serious / rude thing to do. We need some kind of UI that emphasizes that it's not a big deal whatsoever and is not a rude thing.

Makes sense, thanks for your answer.

This is why I love subreddits on Reddit. I want a slice of you, like say I was to discuss topics like cloud hosting or vinyl records. I don’t really care what else you’re into I want to connect on these topics we have in common.

As much as the Reddit website and app and overall experience is garbage the communities can be good

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