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Who Says Money Can't Buy Friends?
Courtney5000 writes "It looks like some users of popular networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook have stooped so low as to actually pay real money for friends. These friends aren't even real believe it or not. You can apparently choose from a selection of 'models' to leave you customized comments to look like you have friends and are popular online. This is unbelievable!"
MySpace and Facebook are hugely popular with the general population
No. Popular with angsty kids who still consider their favorite band-of-the-week as a defining characteristic of their very existence.
Most of us grow out of that.
But what social networks do folks here use?
The question makes no sense. What "social networks"? Hello? Turn off the computer, go outside, and introduce yourself to the damn neighbors!!!
Is there a good one that offers the benefits of a Facebook or Myspace, while being less superficial and spammy?
Mutually exclusive goals. "Social networking" sites exist to feed superficiality - What gives the benefits of superficiality without the superficiality? Meaningless. Letting people buy "friends" just epitomizes that idea (as you correctly point out), thus making it perfectly "normal" in context, but no less shallow.
In the real world, people don't count their "friends" by the thousands. Personally, I have three "real" friends, with another dozen or so for whom I'd lightly use the term. And I consider that just a fine state of affairs. Many more, and I couldn't live up to the social obligations implicit in the concept of friendship. What pass as friends on Myspace and similar sites, I wouldn'teven count as mere acquaintances in the real world.
If you've never met someone, never talked to them, and know nothing about them other than the fiction they choose to put on an ego-stroking web-page, where the hell do you get off calling them "friends"?