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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.
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SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
No, this is Idle. Derp.
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! --
But perhaps good for a laugh; A group that bluntly attempts to address the problem.
Shut up about yourself.
The article didn't seem to mention hiding. I wonder if they ignored it entirely? If FB did not have the ability to hide applications I'd have quit it a long time ago. Hiding would seem to be an entirely different issue than dropping someone as a 'friend'. There are many people whom I want to still see updates from, I simply do not care about the games/apps at all.
Why would it complicate your life? If you get obsessed with it I suppose it would.
I held off for some time but finally gave in because I got an invite from a friend overseas and decided this would be a convenient way to stay in touch. I've rekindled relationships with a few long lost friends. Nothing profound but it's nice to be in touch with people I haven't seen in a while. Not many, I'll admit; I ignore the vast majority of people on the list. It's simply another tool for facilitating communication.
Fortunately, I don't have any people on my list who are compelled to make political posts. The worst I get are the usual inanities; idiotic comments that make no sense to anyone but those in the know and stupid inspirational messages that pretend to have figured out the meaning of life where countless philosophers over the last few millennia could not. Whenever the frequency of dump posts rises above my ability to tolerate them I simply block that individual's posts.
A big peeve of mine are those who simply friend people to grow their list, like there's a prize for having a huge number of friends. I had a classmate I hadn't really seen since elementary school friend a cousin of mine he had never met and who's living somewhere in Europe. It's ridiculous, but then it's nothing to get worked up about.
I will visit on a regular basis, but I don't post much at all. If Facebook has had any impact at all, I would have to admit it's been more positive than negative. Somehow I feel dirty admitting that, but it's the truth.
Right on. Especially with a decent facebook client on my phone, it functions almost like a convergence of various online services that I've been using for years. Email, instant messaging, event planning, photo sharing, etc.
While it's certainly got its own annoying quirks, there are relatively simple (if not always straightforward) ways of dealing with most of them, and if you aren't afraid of potentially offending a few people, then you can keep your friend list limited to what you find useful.
Much of what my facebook friends post is irrelevant to me and gets skimmed right over, and I hardly ever post content myself. But with a little bit of care to how I've set it up, I don't find the signal-to-noise ration on facebook any worse than the most of the rest of the internet. And the fact that such a high percentage of people that I might want to get in touch with have an account, it can be incredibly useful at times.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
Jesus probably wouldn't have used those long metal poles to hold up the banner during a thunderstorm.
But likey farm links aren't apps, though. Your only choice is to hide the user, or report it as spam.
Which actually sounds like good idea, now that I think about it.