

The Facebook Cull - jgrahamc
http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/the-facebook-cull

======
samdk
_But now I’m down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal
life. Details of my family, my travels and my thoughts that were too sensitive
to broadcast to just anyone are now fair game._

Until Facebook decides at some point that those too should be public. I try my
best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all private.
At some point I don't think they will be anymore.

(related: [http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-
reduce...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduces-
control-over-personal-information))

~~~
jeebusroxors
_I try my best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all
private._

This should be the attitude for putting anything online. If it's posted online
I find it best to just assume that it is, or will become public at some point
and base if it should be posted on that.

~~~
Batsu
I try to do the same, but sadly without seeming rude and asking friends to
remove you from photos or leaving you out of messages, you leave it to chance.

For instance, I've never put a photo of myself online, yet Facebook has me
tagged well over 300 times from going out to bars with friends. I'm ok with my
friends seeing these since they actually know me, but I can't control the
privacy settings on their albums -- only whether or not people can get to
those photos from my page.

I don't walk around with the uneasy feeling that, at any time, I could be
photographed and unknowingly put online... but I still think about it from
time to time.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Why are you bothered about people seeing you in photos?

------
davidwparker
If you do plan on removing friends rather than using FB lists and organizing
permissions based on lists, I would suggest going to
<http://www.facebook.com/friends/>

It allows you to click X next to each friend rather than going into each
individual profile to remove them.

~~~
Xichekolas
Specifically, the list including all your friends, and none of your other
'connections':

<http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp>

I thought I'd try this out to see how it felt. Using only the criteria "do I
care about what this person is doing today?" I managed to axe 122 people, and
don't feel bad about it at all.

------
msy
I chose to cull facebook instead. No regrets.

~~~
losvedir
I think this has become the "I don't even own a TV" among those who don't even
own TVs.

But basically same for me. I rarely go to facebook anymore. But new messages
get emailed to me, and they have that neat feature where you can just reply to
the email and it posts it to facebook. No need to even visit the site!

------
e1ven
I use the same tri-level distinction- Facebook for people I know and talk to
regularly. Linked-In for People I know through Work. Twitter for everyone.

I also use twitter as my base-level feed; It inserts into Linked In and
Facebook, so people don't need to pay attention to all of them; The public
things trickle up.

I believe that Facebook would prefer that we solve this problem by using
friend-lists. With lists, you can say "Push this update only to members of my
family", or "Only show this to my D&D Buddies"

While I've experimented with that a bit, too many things are too granular,
where they are only showed to all-friends, or nothing.

For now, having the firewall of separate services serves me well.

~~~
iaskwhy
I've been trying this for a while and intend to write a nice post about
tweaking friends' lists on Facebook. In summary, I created two lists:

1\. One for people who "can see everything" (that's the name of the list
actually) and that's where I keep my closest friends. They have access to
everything I share.

2\. Another for people who "can't see anything" (again, that's its name) and
that's where I keep people who I can't avoid adding as friends but I don't
want them to see anything I share, think big company's partners who wouldn't
like me to reject them.

Everyone else is not on a list and they can see my profile and photos but
won't see my status updates. There's people from school days whom I have no
connection besides that and don't deserve to keep them updated on my life but
I still want to keep their contact.

------
msluyter
I've done this recently as well. That, or I've hidden status updates from
various pseudo-friends. It's nice to reconnect with that person from high
school... for a while, but then I really don't want to hear about their
personal lives. Perhaps we need multi-level friendships in Facebook, as in,
friends vs. acquaintances? Though I guess if someone friends you and you only
"acquaintance" them, things could get ugly.

~~~
wheels
You can actually define groups of friends and then set permissions based on
those groups.

------
bcl
No matter how close your FB friends I suggest not posting anything you
wouldn't say in a public forum. Electronic communications can come back to
bite you, friends can share your posts and FB saves literally everything.
Note, this advice isn't limited to FB. It applies to email as well.

~~~
MartinCron
Reminds me of some advice from my intro to law class in college: The "e" in
e-mail stands for "evidence".

------
BrandonM
At first I read this post and thought it was a pretty good idea. Upon further
consideration, I reconsidered this comment:

 _It was a surprisingly hard thing to do, but now I’m left with 35 people that
I actually know: people I’d actually talk to in the real world._

Personally, if my Facebook was:

Family: over 35 - my mom, stepdad, stepmom, 3 siblings, about 10 aunts and
uncles, 3 grandparents, about 15 cousins, and 2 in-laws

Might-as-well-be-family[1]: about 15 more

Friends I enjoy hanging out with... weekly: probably 10 more, monthly: maybe
20 more, a few times a year: at least 40 more

People I rarely see but chat with occasionally when I see them on Facebook:
another 30?

That means that my culled Facebook list would still have at least 150 people.
Once you have that many friends, what's a few more even if you don't know them
that well?

I'm not in any way trying to brag about how many friends I have. In my
experience this is pretty much standard for people in the 18-28 age range (I'm
26). It seems to me that the author's "lucky 35" being that small is the
exception, and for most people such an exercise would be mostly pointless.

For me, Facebook isn't only for "people I'd actually talk to in the real
world," anyways. It's also interesting to check out the profiles of people you
knew several years ago but never talk to anymore, just to see what they're up
to these days and maybe post "Hey, longtime no see! Glad to see you're doing
well :)" messages on their walls.

And when it comes down to it Facebook is all about being social. Part of that
is photo-sharing: if you want to tag -- or be tagged by -- someone you see
occasionally (we all party sometimes, right?), you have to be friends with
them. Ditto if you want to invite them to your next big party, or suggest they
check out a small band that you enjoy. And it's pretty awesome when you can
make your status "driving out to <interesting place 6 hours away> this
weekend, who's with me?" or "looking for a ride to <hometown 2+ hours from my
college town> Friday" and be reasonably likely to get a reply.

I agree with the idea of having a special network for your closest friends and
family. I just think that if you're using Facebook for that, you're vastly
under-utilizing its potential.

[1] My closest friends, past roommates that I still care a lot about, my ex-
but-longtime-girlfriend's family, extended-extended family, etc.

------
ivankirigin
You can hide people from your news feed. You can also make a list of friends
and the default publishing privacy setting so only that list can see things.
There is no need to break the connection.

With the type-ahead in composing messages and the search, you don't need to
look through a list of friends.

Also, if you never pay attention to people, the algorithms on various parts of
the site will make it so their content doesn't bubble up as much, even
indirectly. An example might be the games presented in the gaming dashboard
<http://www.facebook.com/?sk=games>

------
dasil003
Sounds liberating, but still too much politics I think. I prefer to just
rarely rarely post to Facebook.

~~~
jdminhbg
Same. Facebook's a giant, constantly-changing mess. I use it to contact people
whose email I don't have and for nothing else.

I would fix his public-vs-private status dilemma by having a public Twitter
account and a friends-only Twitter account.

------
Barnabas
I think there's some irony in only allowing comments with FB connect.

------
mike-cardwell
I did this from the start.

Facebook: Friends. People I actually know in real life LinkedIn: Work
colleagues and acquaintances Twitter: Random geeks who want to follow tech
stuff

------
u48998
I don't need to cull anything because I never allowed Facebook or myself to
build such a fake list of friends and relationship to begin with. However,
even with only close family in your list, FB (or any other service besides the
email service you trust) is not worth sharing anything that is of private
nature. Ultimately, FB is as same as any other place on the internet.

I use FB's private nature of service for close family and friends only to
email them as it is convenient.

