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.

Comments

100th my ass

[vux984]

'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."

Re:100th my ass

[elfprince13]

Facebook friends are mostly irrelevant in terms of people you actually care about friendship with anyway. It's more like a unified contact list from my various lives, so anyone I might want to contact ever stays on the list. If they are annoying, I just block their posts from my feed. End of problem.

Re:100th my ass

[Larryish]

I dropped my Facebook account last month.

Facebook is teh suck.

Most of the people I "friended" were high school classmates who live in a different state and I haven't seen in decades.

Maybe I am sort of cold (my wife calls me "Dexter") but I really don't care to see a constant stream of medical drama and pictures of people's inbred rodent children.

(LOL@rodent)

Re:Still friends?

[somersault]

I just click the little X in the corner of their useless status update. This hides everything they say/do without them feeling virtually offended. Win!

If By "Useless" You Mean...

[pshumate]

...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.

Re:If By "Useless" You Mean...

[pshumate]

I'll confess: I didn't even know about hiding until a few months ago. A lot of people seem to find out about it as if it's a "dirty little secret", which makes no sense. I'd like to see a warning for the first (and only the first) time you attempt to de-friend someone, asking you if you knew about hiding.

This is why I don't get Twitter

[melted]

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.

Re:This is why I don't get Twitter

[AndrewNeo]

Obviously you don't get Twitter, because you should follow things that interest you and aren't noise. Now it's very likely that people you friend on Facebook are friended because they are actual real life friends or family. I don't have a social obligation to follow my family on Twitter, but I can subscribe to accounts that I feel are not noise, and remove ones that are. If you're following noise on Twitter (or Facebook, really) it's your own damn fault.

Re:What exactly is the middle ground?

[Scrameustache]

what exactly are the middle ground topics that keep 500M people addicted to FB?

Who's sleeping with whom.

Re:Still friends?

[ehrichweiss]

I don't feel the need to protect their feelings; I am like this with family as well, online or in person. If they can't keep it straight, I do it for them and it gives them a bit of feedback that people might just be fed up with their shit. I ESPECIALLY do this if I hear "tealiban", "demoncrat", "teabagger" or any other term meant to polarize politically/socially whether I support their view or not.

Re:What exactly is the middle ground?

[Seumas]

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?

Themselves.

Re:You learn diffferent things about people online

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I like having friends who have different political and religious beliefs from mine. It keeps my on my toes, makes me examine my own beliefs, and can provide hours of entertaining conversation. But I do not enjoy being shouted at by crazy people. A big part of having an online life is learning when things have gone over that line.

The most useless

[Mesa MIke]

... 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.

Re:What about those who refuse to join?

[Hatta]

Just so hollow and ineffectual, for the most part, is our ordinary conversation. Surface meets surface. When our life ceases to be inward and private, conversation degenerates into mere gossip. We rarely meet a man who can tell us any news which he has not read in a newspaper, or been told by his neighbor; and, for the most part, the only difference between us and our fellow is that he has seen the newspaper, or been out to tea, and we have not. In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office. You may depend on it, that the poor fellow who walks away with the greatest number of letters, proud of his extensive correspondence, has not heard from himself this long while.

-Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle, 1863

Replace "newspaper" with "blog" and "post-office" with "facebook" and it applies perfectly today.

Re:You learn diffferent things about people online

[Hatta]

minor "offenses". Like disliking having a mosque near Ground Zero

Religious bigotry is no minor offense.