How Facebook Ruins Friendships | Hacker News Reader

How Facebook Ruins Friendships

online.wsj.com

28 pointstokenadult20 comments

Open articleView on HN

It seems like this author has several unrelated points:

* some people post boring updates;

* it's easy to miscommunicate emotional content;

* some people overshare;

* SNSes collapse our multiple public masks (heavy metal and kittens) into one;

* dumping people is more painful.

They also include a single sentence about the advantages of SNS web sites.

So what's the article about? Why did they feel the need to write a 1300-word editorial about every negative aspect of social networking sites? It seems weird to devote 1300 words to the negatives and one sentence to the positives.

The author's experience is fairly different from mine. My Facebook signal-to-noise ratio is somewhere around -5 to -10 dB. Here are the most recent interesting bits from my Facebook stream (just the front page):

* A friend's youngest daughter is about to go off to college. Major life transition for him.

* Another friend, who's mostly famous for his anti-spam efforts, is DJing at a community radio station I hadn't heard of before. Add to my mental list of friends involved in community radio.

* A new online video site called Magma has launched and been recommended by someone trustworthy.

* Some details on my ex-stepson's microbrewing experiments. Sounds like he's getting pretty serious about microbrewing, and would be a good person to ask if I have questions.

* Another friend, who I thought was going to be at Foo Camp this week, is still in Montreal. Maybe Foo Camp hasn't started yet? I can't find information on the web about it.

* Another friend has decided to get a Singer 6510 sewing machine because the less expensive machines weren't worthwhile. Useful data point for the next time I buy a sewing machine.

* My sister's cousin just visited San Francisco to visit family — but apparently my sister wasn't included in the outing. Maybe she was busy?

* Another friend is having a hard time recovering from surgery a few weeks ago, and can't type. He's not finding Dragon Naturally Speaking useful for coding.

* Another friend is starting her first day of work as a full-fledged lawyer. In Puerto Rico.

* Another friend has just joined a chorus. I didn't know she sang.

None of these are so urgent as to justify a phone call to tell me about them. But they are all very interesting to me, and it's highly beneficial (I think) for me to know things like that about what's going on in my friends' lives.

And then there's the opportunity to respond to people — just to remind them that I'm thinking about them sometimes, but also sometimes to offer my advice or thoughts, or to let them know I appreciated what they had to say.

Print media begins its final epic but ultimately futile attack on the internet before it dies.

"I'm tired of loved ones—you know who you are—who claim they are too busy to pick up the phone, or even write a decent email, yet spend hours on social-media sites"

Yes, because getting on the phone with you for hours on end telling you all about my vacation is the same thing as spending 3 minutes uploading my photos to Facebook. Has it occurred to the author that maybe said friends aren't close enough to be spending time on the phone like this?

I call shenanigans on this entire article. It seems to suggest that Facebook as weakened friendships. No, I still talk to my closest friends just as often - on the phone, online, in person, wherever. The difference is now you can keep track of your "outer circle" much more easily than before. This is not a bad thing.

Also, you can arrange to meet them more easily.

Dunbar's number gets a slight boost.

"My Facebook signal-to-noise ratio is somewhere around -5 to -10 dB."

I don't know how much you know about audio, but that's pretty freaking high.

I guess some people are just super-interested in the lives of their friends & associates. That's cool. I'm not, but whatever, diff'rent strokes and all that.

Audio doesn't have anything to do with it.

-5 dB is a ratio of roughly 1:3. -10dB is a ratio of exactly 1:10. If my Facebook SNR is -10dB, that means that the power in the noise on Facebook is 10× the power in the signal. (I'm equating power here to post counts, not squared words per post or something.)

That means I have to get some signal gain out of somewhere to extract useful information from Facebook. Which is true.

I don't know whether by "pretty freaking high" you mean "that's a lot of signal" or "that's a lot of noise" or what. It would be a terrible signal-to-noise ratio for audio equipment. Fortunately my brain is not a tube amp.

"Audio doesn't have anything to do with it."

Argh, you are the one who made an audio analogy!

My point was that you seemed to be saying -10dB was no problem, but that would be an unbearable level of noise if you tried to listen to it. Bah, it was just silly nit-picking, forget it!

I didn't bring up audio; I just used dB. dB are a perfectly good unit to measure a signal-to-noise ratio for any continuous scalar signal: audio, radio, light, voltage on a wire, whatever. I was thinking of the analogy to radio in particular, where you can use spread-spectrum techniques to get useful data out of SNRs much worse than -10dB.

It certainly is the case that the article author thought Facebook contained an unbearable amount of noise, and I don't.

This is why microblogging needs layers. The inanity of a post should be machine-readable so users can filter those they follow based on how much they want to know. At the bottommost level would be stream-of-bioinformatics auto-logged by attached devices. At the top level would be something like "[username] was born [timestamp]. [username] died [timestamp]." Anything in-between should be categorized somehow (by the user themself? by a trust network? by NLP?) I like to use the ZUI and LOD metaphor here.

Nah, at the bottom should be "GUESS WHICH TARANTINO MOVIE CHARACTER YOU ARE!?"

I suspect there would be millions of data points on the bioinformatics corresponding with the taking of that quiz.

Incidentally this is a good metric in hiring decisions. Anyone who has the time or interest to complete this survey is probably not the best fit. It would be like if you asked an interviewee what the like to read and they said Cosmo and Redbook.

Now that I think about it, every time I see someone post one of those things I subconsciously lose a little respect for them. :-/

Here's a novel idea. Stop checking people's facebook status updates if you don't care!! Wow, that was really hard.

Disclaimer: WSJ's parent company owns Facebook's biggest competitor, Myspace.

I'm actually considering only using Facebook for business relationships. Probably 75% of my friends are customers or industry peers. In that regard, I find it a useful tool for connecting and getting instant feedback on things.

For personal connections I find it annoying for many of the reasons he states.

On another note, it is this kind of mindset that is both unadaptive and uncreative. Rather than tout the benefits of the new social world, it focuses on the negatives. And then, rather than focusing on how the negatives can be fixed, it focuses on just complaining about them.

I wonder how many here prefer txt based communication over talking on a phone, except while driving.

With Facebook you can state something and a conversation may or may not happen. With txt, email or IM you can communicate one to one what's going on now, where & what time to meet up and other conversational subjects.

Due to bootstrapping I got rid of my cellphone and really have not missed it; only once when I had a flat-tire I wish I had one. Now & since then I just carry my iTouch as there is WiFi all around. I'm probably anomaly?

I prefer face to face to texting, texting to phone, and phone to email/im. At least, for keeping up with local friends. For friends who live several states away, I prefer facebook > im > skype. I hardly get any personal e-mail.

The eye roll button is truly a good idea.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com