

Ask HN: Social Networks as Informational Hunger Companions - fedorzima

It is easy and comfortable to communicate on the Internet. Friends are ready to stay 24/7 online, and I can go online whenever I please. New social networks sprout everywhere like mushrooms, old ones hastily pump up their functionality. It is a norm today to have 10 accounts at various services.<p>Yet, the more we have, the more conspicuous is the problem spreading over the Internet of our days: it is the issue of the content which is adequate for the concrete user. As it often happens, quantitative development is inversely proportional to the qualitative one. New social networks produced in a familiar format are fun at best, but quite useless precisely due to their derivative nature.
<i></i>
So, an extensive use of the unsubscribe function (that allows a break in subscription to messages without breaking the connection with a friend) in Facebook is a sign of tighter content requirements. Unsubscribe is swiftly catching up with “like” in popularity. We are happy to communicate with people, but we never fully match with them. And that is normal, it is just what we have in our offline life. It is fun to discuss movies with John, or to speak to Michael about his recent crazy trip, but it is boring to discuss other things with them, and you don’t feel like offending them by unfriending (no matter how ridiculous such offence might look).<p>As a result, messages from persons, whose opinions I am not interested in, build up to form dense information noise. In the intense past the time we fell in love with social networks (“I’ve got many friends at any hour of the day”), this noise was fun. In the present, when we are fed up with communication, we feel the need for reliable information. Social networks seem to be ideal for getting advice. But this info noise pulls the quality of such advice down. A user having thousands friends does not enjoy any “informational” advantages.<p>What do you think?
======
fedorzima
continue: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4426685>

