Slashdot Mirror
Top Reason for Facebook Unfriending Is Too Many Useless Posts
alphadogg writes "The No. 1 reason why friends dump friends on Facebook is when they get fed up seeing too many useless posts, according to new research out of the University of Colorado Denver Business School. Posts about polarizing subjects such as politics and religion as well as inappropriate and racist comments also sever many Facebook relationships, according to Christopher Sibona, a PhD student in the Computer and Science and Information Systems program. 'Researchers spend a lot of time examining how people form friendships online but little is known on how those relationships end,' said Sibona, whose research will be published in January by the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. 'Perhaps this will help us develop a theory of the entire cycle of friending and unfriending.' Sibona surveyed more than 1,500 Facebook users to get to the bottom of why people dump each other. Not surprisingly, people who flood others with posts are at great risk of being unfriended. 'The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,' he said." Samzenpus likes this.
'The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,' he said."
The first post wasn't interesting. It just took 100 for it to reach the point of "I'd rather not see anything from you at all."
I delegated my facebook account to a third party. She can let me know if anything worthwile has occured in my social parabola. (also maintain any farms, etc. I haven't actually looked at facebook in months.
0xB315AA8D852DCD3F3DCA578FD2E0BF88
Wouldn't that mean that nobody is friends anymore?
Ta dit boom.
This is news ???
people dump/avoid/ignore stupid/selfish/trollish friends.
be it on facebook or anywhere else.
-- It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. -- Aristotle
I spotted this shirt at the mall that was just SOOOO amazing! I'm attaching pics, including some of my dog sitting the shirt. Isn't he just ADORABLE???!!! XO
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If stimulating debate over politics and religion are too "polarizing" (takes too much thinking?) and some topics are too banal, what exactly are the middle ground topics that keep 500M people addicted to FB?
Twitter is all posts.. all useless.....
There's a lot of FB users too dumb to figure out how to hide and individual or an application.
*hides alphadogg*
If you want to unfriend me for what I post, that's fine. I'm not going to change who I am or try to put on some charade to have a bunch of "friends". They should take into account, "When's the last time, if ever, this person has communicated with you?"
So what you're saying is people don't want to be friends with people who babble on and on incessantly about nothing.
What a novel concept! Maybe Facebook should implement a Useless button, lest they enable even more rifts between friends.
ALSO the same!
Facebook IS too many useless posts.
Can someone tell me the major reason as to why those capable of joining Facebook refuse to join?
Disclaimer: I am one of those who refuse to join Facebook. My reason is simple: I do not see what joining this social network would do to improve my life. In fact, I believe it would simply complicate it. Am I wrong?
The Facebook environment really doesn't do much to encourage extended dialog or discussion, so LCD wins.
And quitters never win.
You can always click in the top right of each newsfeed link, or assign people to lists.
For example, I have different lists for each game, and have special ones for Family, the city I grew up in, the city I live in, people who go to film festivals with me, and people who have specific activities I do with them. Then I change the order of the lists so I mostly see the ones I want.
And then, if someone posts a lot of useless stuff, I just Hide PERSON on the newsfeed from them - they're still friends, I can still see if they specifically refer to me, but I don't hear the useless blather. If they post about some game or app I don't care about, I just click Hide and select HIDE NAMEOFGAME or HIDE NAMEOFAPP and poof it's gone.
What will get you dropped is spam posts. Or Tagging me in pictures that I'm not in. That is an automatic Defriend.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Is it just me or do researchers like stating the obvious.
did you forget to take your meds?
...a constant barrage of FarmVille/Mafia Wars posts then yes, that's why I unfriend/hide people. I don't care if you need eighteen Mystic Geegaws to complete your Undersea Mirth Palace, people.
There are people I've known for years IRL who hold bizarre beliefs I'd never suspected they held, because they don't talk about them in person, but who will happily spout off about these beliefs on FB, LJ, etc. All that religious bigotry, racism, authoritarianism, etc. that people keep buttoned up in personal conversation comes out at the keyboard, even when the people making the posts know that their friends are going to be reading what they write. And yeah, that's been enough to end a few friendships for me, IRL as well as online. You want to post a hundred times about your favorite band? Okay, no problem, I'll just skip past it. You want to talk about how all Muslims are terrorists and all black people are criminals and Barack Hussein Obama is an al-Qaeda robot sent back from the future to terminate American liberties and ensure the rise of the Kenyan cyber-hegemony? Bye now, and don't let the virtual door hit you in the virtual ass on the way out.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Seriously, if I unfriended everyone who posted inane junk on their wall, I'd have no friends. It's easier to just quit Facebook.
Kind of like Slashdot!
But perhaps good for a laugh; A group that bluntly attempts to address the problem.
Shut up about yourself.
The only person i've unfriended was posting their political bullfooey 2-3 times a day. I don't talk to my friends about politics, that ish is personal and one-sided.
being on Facebook on my lab time: researching!
Useless post!
Someone spent the time to determine that if you are a polarizing inappropriate racist you won't have many friends?
I tend to unfriend people if they invite me (and everyone else on their friends list) to stupid events that I don't care about.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
This is why I don't get Twitter. There, uselessness of the post is not only encouraged, but also enforced by post length limitations, and by the lack of relevance-filtered feed. It's pretty much white noise.
I get lots of friendship requests from people I knew in the past, such as high school classmates. I usually accept these, thinking stupidly that these people actually want to talk to me or god forbid, catch up on old times.
Most of the time, I accept these and send a message asking what they've been up to and so on. These messages almost always go unanswered.
Seriously, what's the point of "friending" (is that a verb now?) someone if you have no intent to communicate?
Of course, we've already beaten to death the constant barrage of inane game and application request posts, which are equally annoying.
I'm probably very much in the minority, but in my own life, I have about 3 people (aside from my parents) who I would consider true friends (as in, if the shit hit the fan, they would be there).
This, I believe, is the perhaps the problem with social networks (obviously, this isn't always the case). It tends to be less about a way to connect with your friends and more often a way to satisfy a persons own ego.
Whether that's good or bad I leave up to the reader.
Facebemybospacebook friends aren't real friends, as they are usually violet/orange.
You are a Prawnus Maximus.
If I had an Ass, I'd call it Fanny Bottom, then I could slap my Ass; Fanny Bottom, on the Arse.
All posts on Facebook are useless.
Maybe Facebook should implement a "dislike" button... that might give those who feel that updating their status about their bowel functions every couple hours a day is really not that interesting and that yes, your actually losing friends over it.
1. They keeping posting their game accomplishments over and over
2. They just recently got married and keep posting how much in love they are (I'm single)
Long ago I found some setting where you can set ignore posts from a person. No insult given and no more "I'm bored" posts( or more specifically "im board' posts.)
I forget the setting but that is what Google is for.
Although this is best for people who have nothing useful to say. The worst is when 1 post in 100 is critical.
This article's awesome! I want everyone I know to see it and also to know that I'm SOOOOOOooooo tired.
It's always confirmation bias!
Lots of friendships die anyway. You win some you lose some.
I gave a little laugh at the "Samzenpus likes this" note at the bottom :-)
Cute.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
De-friending seems harsh for only a constant barrage of drivel. Just use the Hide feature and most of the drivel is gone. Especially the Game related as you can choose to hide the game messages or the person. Just pick the game and you still get the real messages and keep your friend.
Only De-friended someone once when a friend got divorced and I did not care to hear their ex's bs.
Just hide them. So now I don't have to read useless garbage from my young cousin and he can't complain that I unfriended his ass!
Tired of my customary (Score:1)
It is possible to change your settings so it won't show posts from certain people in your news feed.
..FB doesn't separate acquaintances from actual friends. I friend a lot of people I know or have met so their numbers show up in my Android phone on the off chance I need to call them, when I don't *actually* maintain a close friendship with them. Some people don't friend acquaintances. Others friend people they don't know at all. FB needs to have a way to separate these people into groups so viewing and posting permissions can be appropriately and easily applied.
People socialize to maintain relationships, to know what's going on in each other's lives, and provide support, encouragement, and a laugh or two. This works online and offline. It's not really complicated.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
You aren't friends with people who talk shit, in real live or on facebook.
I care not for your karma and your mod points.
I usually unfriend for reasons like those in the article. I rationalize it like this: yes, it's great reconnecting with friends from highschool or college, but if it was so important to remain friends, why did we not communicate for the last 10 years? We've grown apart, or really we weren't friends in the first place. Oh, you'd like us to pray to Jesus for.... right, the LORD Jesus.... yeah, okay the LORD OUR SAVOIR JESUS....
Some things aren't meant to last. Have a nice life, byebye....
I wish Facebook would make "App Friends" and "Friend Friends". My wife has like 4,000 friends, only about 20 of which are real friends. I'd love it if there was a clear easy way/toggle to show/not show posts from app friends, etc.
Therefore we can conclude that if Slashdot were to be a Facebook page, it would have very few friends.
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
So, a band I'm in signed up for "Tweet For A Track" - basically, a service that gives away a free song to folks to Twitter about the record. Mildly-bribed social networking. There are pros/cons to this approach, but we thought we'd try it. Of course, our twitter feed is linked to FB (tweets become FB Wall posts automatically). One day it dawns on us that Tweet for A Track had been sending the same, repeated, now-getting-quite-spammy promotional tweets every couple of weeks - and thus creating a host of boring, spammy FB Wall posts. Yikes! We had to go kill the TFaT / Twitter connection and then hand-delete all the FB posts. Not good. So, the moral of the story is be very very careful about any 'services' you sign up for that have the power to post stuff, directly or indirectly, to your FB Wall. You can automate the process of alienating your friends very easily via these handy-dandy services.
liked this.
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Gaining an understanding of the way the network of friends morphs based on wants and needs is interesting. Using that insight to try and maintain a maximum number of friends is questionable at best. I would much rather use such information to let people know that they do not need to feel guilty about unfriending because it is normal, or if the results seem irrational we can know how "normal" people think so that we can be sure to avoid such behavior in the future, even if just for ourselves.
TL;DR Now you know if you are normal on FB. Yay?
Want Big Business out of government? Take away the incentive and start by getting government out of big business!
I defriended someone for movie reviews. Not because they were filled with spoilers. Because they were awful. I take movies and film making very seriously (even the low/no budget films). I used to work around low budget films, I have friends that still do.
She would say stuff about how indy or arthouse films were hard to follow so she turned them off 10 minutes into them (or just avoided them), but in the next post would praise whatever summer blockbuster she saw that day. She actually said several of my favorite acclaimed films were stupid but then posted a raving review of how Transformers 2 was the best movie she ever saw.
I thought she wasn't serious at first, but after several of months of seeing it, I realized she was the reason Micheal Bay keeps getting to make more movies. I didn't want to be a witness to that.
Rather than unfriend them I hide people's posts. If I want to check up on what you're doing I'll go to your page. If not, I don't pay attention, but you don't know about it.
Favourite bands have got nothing on babies. Each time another girl I went to school with has a baby, another unending stream of crap photos and posts begins, and I mark the to not show in my newsfeed. If I had a child and turned into a photo posting retard, I'd at least have the decency to make a facebook account for the child and post the shit there; at least then only people who opted in would receive the barrage of spam about the midget
There is a simple way you won't get "unfriended"....don't subscribe to social networking, at all (any flavor). I have never been friended, unfriended, tweeted or blogged. Simple! Go game or something... Maybe I'm just getting old, or tired of hearing about the interwebs social anything.
the top and ONLY reason for "facebook unfriending" is signing up for a facebook account in the first place.
When you're trying to track down old female friends from school, but they've changed their surname since they got married, and now they have a picture of a baby up as their profile pic. How the fuck are you supposed to know it's them?! How are you supposed to know whether to add them or not? Grrrr! Attention, bitches! Not everyone thinks your baby is cute! We just want to get a look at you and see how well you held off the flab over the years so we can gloat about how we're living a more fulfilling life than you are!
Drill baby drill - on Mars
No one uses Facebook anymore, it's too crowded.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
You shouldn't put too much into anything you post on Facebook, because anything overtly personal can and will be used against you. Therefore, people only post endless streams of banalities, for fear that any hint of an opinion about something might offend somebody. However, banality is itself offensive, or at least boring, so why bother posting at all?
Sometimes someone will post a picture or a link that is interesting, but otherwise Facebook posts are pure drivel. What's the last truly insightful or interesting thing you've seen on Facebook? I really can't think of anything, it's pure pablum. I enjoyed learning a bit about a few people from my past, but now the only reason I log in is out of idle boredom, and I always leave feeling wishing I could get that little bit of my life back. It's entertaining on the level of watching a soap opera. Maybe worse.
Half of the clutter is the stupid "someone commented on someone's status." I NEVER want to see that from ANYONE-- the first time I did, I thought, "oh, I didn't even know they were sick!". I can use a Greasmonkey script, but that's often inconvenient. Remove those, and that would be a huge improvement in the experience. It looks like someone left debugging turned on in the code.
Also, I find the "hide" feature virtually never accomplishes what I'm after. I don't recall the specifics at the moment because I stopped using it some time ago because it was never useful.
Yeah, I can relate to this. I eventually dumped Facebook because of the flood of inane posts and the dumping I got from news vendors when I 'liked' them. Oh, I read and enjoy the info from SciAM, the Globe&Mail and so forth. But finding my Facebook page becoming an unreadable dumping ground was too much. In the end I shut down my Facebook page because it was nothing but clutter. 'Liking' anybody was just an invite for a nonstop dump of everything they were flogging -- better off to stick with email. At least THAT could be controlled.
.... is foreshadowed by completely serious statements as follows:
"Researchers spend a lot of time examining how people form friendships online but little is known on how those relationships end"
... posts are those stupid likey-link-farm "likes". You can't comment on them, and you can't hide them unless you hide everything that your "friend" posts.
Define 'polarizing'. Do you mean taking a strong stance; for example being strongly for or against a hot-button issue-of-the-day? I am against same-sex marriage and have posted this to FB many times. I got comments from friends who disagreed and even a nasty-gram from one, but no one unfriended me. Anyway, the big pet-peeve for me is people who never post anything at all but have signed up for apps that spam the bejeebers out of everyone. Block the app, rinse, repeat. Then you find their accounts have no activity at all.
I mean what else is there on Facebook?
Left MacRumors because of the religious hate there, the constant harassment and the like, why should facebook be any different.
People don't stick around negative people for very long. Just like in real life, I tend to stay away from those who are sour.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
http://xkcd.com/386/
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
That's the reason I didn't join facebook in the first place. I also didn't want to put anyone else in that position myself.
people delete me when i troll them too much. its really their own fault for posting so much stupid shit
You don't actually have to un-friend someone to stop getting their updates. Just click the X on your news feed by their status update and then "Hide" them. I've had to do this several times and it actually was due to the repetitive nature of their updates. But I'd still like to be able to keep in touch with them, should the spirit ever move me. Besides I only have 3 friends, if I went the un-friending route, it would just be me and my mother.
I've defriended for really, really horribly boring photos. You know, the ones who go to cities and just take a bunch of pictures of themselves in front of various things. Granted, this was a girl I had met at a club and had only talked to once or twice.
I have not found this to be the case, yet. Maybe I need new friends.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
the fact is, you don't really need to unfriend anybody to stop seeing his updates.
just click on the x mark in the upper right corner of the post and say yes to remove this users post from my news feeds, and voila, all the annoying posts disappear.
all the contact info, and option to contact the person about topics you can talk about still stays as it was.
this behavior is equivalent to stopping talking to anybody who has different view about politics or church or maybe sarah palin :) :)
you would not have many friends left to talk to
proof word: loners :D
Lately, new people I meet always ask me if I have a Facebook account; or rather, they ask me what mine is, presuming I have one. I don't, and I tell them so, but offer them my email address and/or website URL instead; and they usually decline.
I'm trying to figure out for what possible reason I would want a Facebook account. I've had a website of my own that I control and can give whatever functionality I want (and remove any I don't want) since before Facebook existed, so I have no use for it as a means of expressing myself. Anything I want to share about myself with the world, I can put up there.
As for communication, there's still email and a variety of instant messaging and chat protocols that I make extensive use of.
So what possible reason would I have for wanting a Facebook, and why would people want to know my Facebook account and yet have no interest in my email or website?
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Actually when I have had friends post too much, I have just filtered them for a while. After some period of time I unfilter.
Then again, I actually have met and know the people on my list so I don't just delete someone on a whim
The only reason I prune my FB friend list is that having random people on there reduces the value of the system.
I do a lot of college recruiting and I often connect with people I am interested in on FB. First, it just helps to connect faces to names when we try to remember later what we liked about a candidate. Second, it provides a easy way to keep in touch with them (eg: we didn't hire someone this year because they weren't ready, but maybe next year). But eventually the people from schools I recruit from became a hefty minority of my friends on FB, and FB started suggesting their friends to me. Which makes sense algorithmically but that's not people I know. Eventually I went back and removed all the candidates that didn't pan out, and FB went back to suggesting (occasionally) people I really did want to reconnect with.
http://ed.markovich.googlepages.com
2. They just recently got married and keep posting how much in love they are (I'm single)
First boyfriends are vastly worse.
where the fuck are the doggie pics? informative, my ass
MOD
THE
FUCK
DOWN
This is news? Am I missing something?
This is why I don't use any social media. Twitter has to be the absolute worst invention in the world. I don't get it just like I don't get people who respond to spam.
Considering most "free" applications in facebook require you to spam commercials for said application to all your friends, I see this as no surprise really.
I "hide" them as fast as I can, but new applications come out ever week to take its place. When you have some friends that seemingly that's all they do with their time, its just easier to "unfriend" than it is to keep "hiding" apps.
Unemployed or stay at home females tend to be the worst offenders in my opinion. They seem to have a lot of time for "farmville, etc..."
Stupid pictures of kids and pets I can deal with. Bombarding me with "Hey I am playing this app, you should to!" a million times is the line.
the people who begin every work week with a post reading "Aww crap, it's Monday" and end it with one that says "Yay, it's Friday!".
faceboook doesnt have fine grained filtering, you either hide a person completely, or unfriend them, or put up with their junk posts. luckily theres a third party solutoin that does give you more filtering options: Facebook Purity FTW! http://www.fbpurity.com/