Comment by jhuckestein | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jhuckestein | Hacker News Reader

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I find it hard to sympathize with most things Kevin Rose writes. Pardon my french but this sounds almost a little... childish? irrelevant?

He thinks it's socially awkward to unfriend some of his several thousand friends? Why did he friend them in the first place? How can he say with a straight face (I'm assuming) that apps like Path and Instagram have shown him that rebuilding his social graph every few years is a "must"? Because of fights with friends? Do adults really fight with their friends and then unfriend them on Facebook? How about just hugging it out afterwards?

These are contributions I'd expect from a mainstream celebrity, but I don't feel like this represents the hacker culture (call it whatever you want) very well.

Sorry for the off-topic. I do like the dynamic, perhaps even implicit, graph idea though.

Honestly, I thought that was the whole point of circles in Google Plus. You make a "Siberia" circle, and the friends you don't want to have anything to do with, you put in that circle, and you crank down the visibility on their posts and don't share stuff with them. The effect is the same, but without them finding out that you unfriended them.

True. At campfire labs we were working on similar asymmetric friendship groups before we got acquired. The problem is that you still have to manage those circles though. In real life, you don't have to put in work to manage your friends. You just know how they fit into the ever-changing friendscape.

Yes, but in real life we don't have ways of broadcasting to this ever-changing landscape. In fact, we tolerate quite a bit of collateral damage: you tell your brother something in confidence and he goes and tells your mother.

Socially, yes, this is insufficient. But this isn't really about social reality, it's a technical solution to boredom, which means people enjoy putting work in to manage their friends. It's the whole reason they're there.

What would be nice is the facility to share something with a friend, combined with software that asks if you would like to share also this with [X] circle?

Also, delay updates a bit so that people have the chance to think things like, "Oh wait, I don't want my mom to see this one..."

If we're talking about a choice between unfriending someone and moving them to Siberia, they're already committed to managing their graph in this case.

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