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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.
'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
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?
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!
which is totally what she said
Coincidentally, I unfriended /. on facebook for this very reason.
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?
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! --
...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.
Someone spent the time to determine that if you are a polarizing inappropriate racist you won't have many friends?
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 stopped speaking to my mum because her Facebook posts were too boring.
Only kidding, her posts are usually way funnier than the rest of Facebook (unintentionally).
which is totally what she said
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.
Slashdot comments are all posts.. all useless.....
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.
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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.
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
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.
... 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.
I mean what else is there on Facebook?
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.