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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.
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.
...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.
Cute pictures of cats and babies. Preferable pictures of both cats AND babies. And bacon.
Sounds like that would make a pretty good sandwich...
What? why are you unfriending me!
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.
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.
what exactly are the middle ground topics that keep 500M people addicted to FB?
Who's sleeping with whom.
You can't take the sky from me...
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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Too polarizing= "God punished the ELCA on the day of their gay vote by sending a tornado that caused huge damage in Minneapolis where they held the vote. I hope that sends a message that HE doesn't want gays in HIS church!!"
Too banal= "Thinking about making some scrambled eggs."
Sweet informative mod.
I just checked Glenn Beck's facebook page and he has plenty of friends.
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.
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.
I was at the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Salt Lake City a few years ago. One of our campaigns is "Standing on the Side of Love," that stands in solidarity with oppressed groups like GLBT and immigrants, etc. The big banner we had hanging from the convention center was struck by lightning. Good thing I don't believe in god or I might have wondered if I'd misunderstood what Jesus would do.
... 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.
-Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle, 1863
Replace "newspaper" with "blog" and "post-office" with "facebook" and it applies perfectly today.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Jesus probably wouldn't have used those long metal poles to hold up the banner during a thunderstorm.