

How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook - zachrose
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=bot;idno=5283331.0003.001;rgn=div1;view=text;cc=bot;xc=1;g=dculture;node=5283331.0003.001%3A8

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cstross
Article is generally correct ... as of 2008.

Facebook changed their strategy, though, which is why it doesn't ring quite so
true today.

The key issue Cory picked up on is that FB2008 had no concept of delineation
of social circles -- between actual close friends, family, people who happen
to know you, folks who used to be friends ages ago, "frenemies", and people
you want to keep tabs on (and vice versa). Nor did it have any concept of
different social roles -- e.g. Cory's teacher example. FB2012 is still pretty
crap at managing all those aspects of multivalent identity, but at least
they've made a few gestures in that direction.

Meanwhile, FB2009-FB2012 picked up users on a wave of network externalities;
if everyone is on FB and using it for messaging, you _can't_ ignore it.

I have an FB account. I hate and loathe FB, but my publishers' marketing folks
insist I have an FB account. "But I've got a blog that gets 10-15 thousand
daily visitors!" I tell them. "But everyone's on facebook," they chant. So I
also have an FB author page with about 2K folks following it (and less than
half of them actively reading it), and it forces me to waste time maintaining
it and tweaking my privacy settings every time FB create a new privacy leak.
This annoys me, and I'm pretty sure it annoys Cory as well, because we both
have public personas and the relationship someone with a public persona has
with FB is somewhat different to that of J. Random Member of Public. Whether
it's truly as bad for everyone else ... shrug.

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JonnieCache
What a nice looking website. There's a bit too much random whitespace above
the article, but it's all very nice and clean. The width is just right.
Thoughts?

Also, 2008 should definitely be in the title.

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wpietri
2008 should certainly be in the title, because this argument is woefully out
of date. If it were right, Facebook would be well into a Friendster-like
decline now.

But everybody has adapted. To my eye, it looks like a combination of better
features on Facebook's part (hiding users, quiet unfriending, friend lists to
control content distribution, auto-filtering of feeds to people it thinks you
care about, etc); more skillful users; wider uptake of good social network
etiquette; and people just getting used to the fact that everybody is on
Facebook.

I look forward to the day that somebody will find a way to challenge Facebook,
but I don't believe this is any longer a route.

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forgottenpaswrd
Haha! It reminds me the guy that wanted to fight with me all day on school, I
broke his nose out of anger on a fight, he was so stupid.

Recently I made something on Internet and got a little famous, got a little
press from TV or newspapers and I received invitations from all the people I
had known in my life, including my biggest enemies on school like this guy or
the girl that ignored me.

Some of them send me things like "I have changed, we could become friends
now". Super creepy ones I tell you.

Why can't be just ignore each other ? Now that we live hundreds of miles away.

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warmwaffles
Easy, don't accept friend requests and ignore them. If they want to stalk you,
take precautions.

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geofft
Why hasn't this happened in the four years since it was published?

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VMG
Because the entire premise is wrong

> It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list—but
> removing someone from your friends list is practically a declaration of war.

It really isn't that bad as he makes it out to be. End of discussion.

~~~
nathan_long
"It really isn't that bad as he makes it out to be. End of discussion."

You say that as though you'd definitively disproved the premise, instead of
just saying "nuh-uh."

Citation?

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reinhardt
In case the question was not tongue-in-cheek, what's the citation for the
original premise? I have trouble imagining what would be a citation for
"(dis)proving" that something is socially awkward.

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DodgyEggplant
kevin rose kinda repeats the same idea today <http://kevinrose.com/the-
boolean-graph>

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3amOpsGuy
>> which lags even end-of-lifed e-mail clients like

>> Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving,

>> and searching.

These words hit the mark with me. I've never found a polite way to word it so
I just bite my tongue and avoid being the negative nelly but whenever someone
shows me some cool new tool or website, odds on bet its missing a ton of basic
functionality that I already had in the boring old pre-web 2.0 version of
whatever the tool is.

We're very forgiving of this in general as consumers but it does suck a fair
bit.

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richardjordan
As others have pointed out, this is woefully out of date. But the core issue
is that it's actually NOT hard to say no to adding someone on Facebook. Life
will go on if you hurt someone's feelings (which you don't really care about
as you don't really like the person anyway). JUST SAY NO to idiots you don't
want to be friends with on Facebook.

For me Facebook is for old friends or solid newer friends, and family members.
Work folks have the abomination that is LinkedIn to connect to me on, others
can use Twitter.

Saying no is okay. Try it occasionally.

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motters
The unrealistic binary friend statuses are what Friendica Red is supposed to
be aimed at resolving, such that it becomes something more like a set of
permissions mapped to degrees of familiarity.

<http://friendica.com/node/51>

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zinssmeister
"So-and-so has sent you a message." This is actually not true at all. Facebook
will email you about a new message and include the message content in that
email. Not sure how old this article is (hate when people publish stuff online
and don't include a proper date).

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delllapssuck
Well, you must admit the average age of persons using Facebook in the span of
a few years went from university age to something like mid-30's or 40's. It's
just not "cool" anymore.

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saryant
This is definitely part of it. As generations come of "Facebook age" are they
really going to want to join the same social network as their parents?

I'm in my early 20s so I was on social networks well before those of my
parent's generation. Just try dodging your parents' friend requests, that
never goes well...

