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Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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..."

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.

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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