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Comment by josh33 | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. Facebook promotes a fake friendship that isn't substantiated by any real human interaction; it's cerebral at best.

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As usual it is what you make it. I only make and accept friend requests with people that I know and have met in real life, and where I am actually interested in knowing what they're doing in life.

I like getting status updates so I get a feeling for what my friends are doing, but serious communication always goes over other channels, phone, IM, email, etc.

I don't really see how Facebook promotes either my use or the friend-hoarder use, to me it's a neutral tool.

Exactly - and anyone on HN should be easily able to use the Friend Lists stuff within facebook. Chat Status, Privacy settings and just the ability to filter down into smaller subsets.. So while I am 'friends' with 320 people.. I see almost everything from the people I'm truly close with, while occasionally dipping into the greater stream from of other acquaintances. While facebook could do some better outreach on some of this stuff (my Dad was overjoyed to find out last week you can block applications -- no more farmville in the news feed), we on HN should be able to use it properly. There's plenty of reasons to complain about fb, but cheapening friendship is not one of them.. it is completely about how you use the tool.

Also - (at least among my general circle - mid 20's, Australia, almost completely non-tech) - Serious personal conversation is now almost predominately facebook. Almost every party (excluding weddings/engagements) is a FB event (with maybe SMS invites). IM = Facebook chat. And email = Facebook PM.

I don't know about "promoting" it. I've stayed at 30-50 facebook friends for as long as I've had the account; I delete people as often as I add new ones, and the affordances are about equal—there's nothing on facebook that says "add this person and then make friends," only "add this person if they are your friend."

The real problem is the psychological tendency to hoard information—the same reason one ends up with an overflowing Rolodex instead of a useful one. People need to learn to treat their friends list like any other inbox: incubate, act upon, or delete.

Yeah I leave some people on my list that I no longer have any real contact with any more just incase they say something interesting from time to time, relating to my interests. I would actually love it if people I knew and added to facebook could post have have interesting HN like conversations on there but it's usually mostly fluff about peoples day to day lives.

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