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Comment by zacharycohn | Hacker News Reader

I had the exact same experience as well, and then I discovered the "hide" button. I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those. Examples of my rules were:

1) If I don't remember who you are, hide. 2) If I knew you in elementary/middle/high school/college and I don't think I'll ever see or speak to you again, hide. (This would cover people who don't share any of my interests, etc). 3) If you spam my newsfeed with "Farmville/Which Twilight character are you/I have a secret to tell you" sort of apps, hide. 4) If we have nothing in common, and I don't think anything you're going to say in the future is going to be interesting/have a real impact on me, hide.

There may be one or two more, but those were the core ones. After applying these rules, I found Facebook was SO much nicer and more fun to use, and there was none of the social stigma of "unfriending" people.

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The hide is useful, but the unnatural part is the "everyone you ever met listening". The great thing about Facebook when I started was it was like blogs or photo sharing, except that everyone was a trusted, real-life friend. Facebook was like sharing photos, jokes, and stories with your circle of friends.

Now that everyone and (and every company) are on facebook, I'm more comfortable back on a blog, where there isn't the illusion of anything but talking to the internet.

You can still do that now. You just need to make groups of your different friend groups (family, real life friends, high school friends, work friends, etc) and share what you want with those groups only, depending on what it is.

Who really wants to put that much effort into putting their relationships into little boxes?

This takes way too much work. As someone who was using Facebook for several years before friend-groups, it was going to be an unreasonable time-sink to sort all those people after the fact.

Someone using facebook AFTER the were introduced definitely should use them.

Why not unfriend rather than hide for some of those situations?

There is social stigma. You'll be seen as petty and somebody that micromanages unimportant parts of life.

facebook gets much better when you unfriend lots of people. fred wilson has his "only bar mitzvah" rule and only has ~80 friends. i still have around 600 down from almost 1000.

Same with Twitter and reducing how many people you follow. I do think with Facebook there is some social pressure to have many friends, especially for younger people.

By people who aren't actually your friends? Chances are they won't even miss you.

No, not just people that aren't your friends. If I was your friend and found out you spent time 'fine-tuning your facebook friends list', I would think you were a petty time-waster.

Well, speak for yourself. I, and many of my Facebook friends, have gone on deleting purges before and I've never seen that reaction. The main fear seems to be upsetting the acquaintances that you unfriend.

If you're going to spend time on Facebook at all, it's worth the time every now and then to make the time better spent. They even have a page called "edit friends" where you can just go down your friends list ticking the X button to unfriend them.

|I developed some rules and then spent about 20 minutes every day for a week hiding people who didn't fall within those.

Oh believe me, I used the hide feature ASAP. But your quote above is my point, I shouldn't have to spend 2+ hours customizing Facebook. Everything should have been opt-in to begin with.

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