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Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

It is amusing that there's less friction to move to a new network than to clean up the old one. Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook) is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook friends than simply stopping using FB much.

But eventually it seems like the same people will move to the new network of choice, and try to contact you there, and you've got the same problem all over again? Or you drift out of touch with that new network...

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> Unfriending (or hiding/muting/whatever while still actively using Facebook) is much more likely to be taken as an affront by your long-time Facebook friends than simply stopping using FB much.

I've muted hundreds of people in my friends list, and they are none-the-wiser.

Hundreds? As in > 200?

Maybe the list shouldn't be called 'friends' anymore? That list is bigger than my list of Outlook + GMail contacts.

As a prime example for a very different use of social networks: Can you explain to me how adding these people to your account (friends, acquaintances, whatever you name the list) adds, especially if they are muted and don't show up in your feed of social stuff (tm) anyway? Fascinating.

Based on what I've seen, refusing to add someone can be seen as a social snub in many circles. Simply adding and muting someone avoids a lot of social hassle of people wanting to know why you refused to add them when you did add some other person.

This is one of the things Google+ got relatively right: Perceived "friendship" are not in any way symmetric. Even close friends will often have different ideas about the depth and importance of their relationship. Facebook has tried very hard to ignore that.

Most people I know have had a facebook account through high school and university. You meet a lot of people in that process. A few years ago adding everyone you vaguely knew was fairly vogue, and so friend lists build up.

I'd say that most people I know just leaving university have around 500-600 friends. Younger people who got facebook earlier in high school tend to have more. It takes a lot more effort to remove friends than it does to add them, and so they build up.

friends used in the facebook sense. I certainly wouldn't consider most of my facebook contacts to be more than acquaintances.

I drove from Alaska to Argentina for 2 years and blogged the whole time, and I visited the "Magic Bus" of Chris McCandless Fame. [1]

Because of both of those, I get about 10 friend requests in Facebook a week. I accept them all in hopes of driving my traffic to my websites. So you are correct - these are not "friends" in the strict sense of the word.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless

I've had an instagram since it started and have watched friends slowly adopt. It really seemed to be catching fire in the past 3 months.

So in my experience I've found that people follow me but because the tool doesn't very easily show if someone follows you back, without digging back and forth through your followers, it's very easy to just unfollow the friends who don't provide content I care about.

It's more similar to Twitters model of pub/sub vs facebooks 1 to 1 dynamic. If I 'defriend' on facebook it forces you to defriend both ways right? I think facebook has made attempts at fixing this with subscriptions but ...

On facebook if you unfriend someone the other person is still attached to you as a subscriber... but they'd only get your public content.

I deleted my Facebook account with it's 700+ friends and moved over to Path. I've been there for about a year and so far only have about 10 friends and family. We use it hourly, sometimes more often, and it's has been a refreshing respite from the cognitive overload (and sometimes time drain) that Facebook used to be. So I get the move to Instagram...

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