There is so much more interesting content on so many other sites, that I really don't miss my deleted (a year ago)Facebook account.
The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
51–60 of 61 posts
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Facebook's limited notion of social relationships creates a poor (and sometimes creepy) user experience That's the thing I kind of wonder about every time there's a discussion related to Facebook here - I personally can't see neither the "limited notion of social relationships" nor a "poor/creepy user experience". I'm curious where that difference of perception comes from. > Facebook model works great at college, k…
The way I was using it is that I have many different social interactions, from people whom I've grown up with and known all my life, to people who happen to ride the same train I do when they commute and prefer the same car. There are a lot of differences between how I might interact with the former and the latter, and what I might share with them. At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown',…
> At one level they are both 'friends' (as defined to be 'not unknown', 'not threat')
I only treat "Facebook friendship" as this type of connection. The difference between a "lifetime friend" and "a friendly person from the same train" is defined by the set of experiences you had together, not by the value of a 32-bit integer. Note, that neither the "real life", nor Facebook platform provides this kind of explicit "friendship value". I choose to use both platforms in the same way - let the "friendship level" be defined by what we talk about, what we do together and what we feel to each other.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#53It's simply a way to populate your feed with more content. They seem to think/know that you will use the service more if there is more content.
I too dislike how much extended network is being utilized these days.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#54You're more likely to have a conversation with a friend of your friend. It's generally much less threatening than talking to a complete stranger. This is how cocktail parties work, people are connected mutually through a friend. I'd venture to say that most relationships are facilitated through a mutual friend. When I tell people I go to the bar by myself to see what kind of people I end up talking to, many of my pee…
"A friend of a friend" is enough for me to take someone's call if they're asking for a personal or professional favor. Lord knows I've been on the receiving end of enough of those gifts. The thing I'm noticing lately is most of my LinkedIn invites nowadays are from people that I have never heard of, but have as mutual friends. It's almost as if that space has gotten big enough to let more folks in. Once you have 500+…
For some reason, denying a FB friend request feels normal, but denying a LinkedIn request makes me feel like a jerk.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#55I refer to Facebook's "People You May Know" feature as "People I Hate." For some of them, Facebook is quite right--I do know them. And I don't want to be friends.
Facebook suggests I be friends with my high school chemistry teacher. No thanks.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#56I refer to Facebook's "People You May Know" feature as "People I Hate." For some of them, Facebook is quite right--I do know them. And I don't want to be friends.
People You May Know for me is 'Friends of couples you have both of on Facebook'.
e.g. my Romanian coworker and her husband have a lot of friends back in Romania, and apparently an assload of them are on Facebook because Facebook is constantly suggesting them to me.
Likewise, someone's brother or ex or girlfriend or whoever friends me and suddenly Facebook has a huge wealth of people to draw from, and yet it can't figure out that I don't know a 14-year-old girl who lives in Arizona who is only friends with one other person I know.
Facebook's friends-of-friends hack is meant for younger groups of people who have large groups of acquaintances outside of their smaller group of friends - think high schoolers or college kids, where you might actually know that person your friend knows, but you don't have them on FB yet.
In comparison, once people hit 25-30 and their friends are scattered across the country (and they start friending coworkers, etc.) the whole system becomes noise over signal, and it all falls apart.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#57The article kindly submitted here shows some interesting examples of assumptions not working right in social network algorithms. Certainly I prefer a narrower rather than a broader sampling in my Facebook homepage feed of posts that have reached the home page of one or another of my more than 700 (!) Facebook friends. But I do like the "friends of friends" reach for one kind of purpose. By default, posts I post to my…
> I am older than most Hacker News participants, and have lived in more than one place, and perhaps that's why 700 friends, not all of whom are active on Facebook, doesn't seem completely excessive.
People younger than me routinely have hundreds or thousands of facebook friends (I have 28, and could easily curate it down). To me it's an introversion / extraversion phenomenon, not an age or mobility one.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A friend of a friend" is enough for me to take someone's call if they're asking for a personal or professional favor. Lord knows I've been on the receiving end of enough of those gifts. The thing I'm noticing lately is most of my LinkedIn invites nowadays are from people that I have never heard of, but have as mutual friends. It's almost as if that space has gotten big enough to let more folks in. Once you have 500+…
For some reason, denying a FB friend request feels normal, but denying a LinkedIn request makes me feel like a jerk.
I just ignore the ones I don't know. Then I can pretend like I didn't see the request
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#59The author has a fair point, but I was left hanging waiting for a "so, what?" at the end. I was hoping there would be something more constructive to this than just a complaint. What should be done about it? What are people really looking for? How can a network with the goal of connecting more people deal with the inevitable noise? How soon should they worry about that? Was Facebook perfect 4 years ago, or is there a…
I'd say it was better 4 years ago. Maybe because they weren't worried about making money yet. Now with all the "optimizations" to the feed, it's less relevant than ever. Or maybe people just stopped posting interesting things on Facebook. Either way I don't see it anymore.
Re: The Friends Of My Friends Are Not My Friends
#60I refer to Facebook's "People You May Know" feature as "People I Hate." For some of them, Facebook is quite right--I do know them. And I don't want to be friends.
Facebook suggests I be friends with my high school chemistry teacher. No thanks.
Nice try, Pinkman. You are not fooling anyone.