Why I have no friends
Recently I spent almost 2 hours “un-friending” over 400 people on Facebook. This incredible length of time was not spend deliberating on the merits of those who I “un-friended,” but rather manually doing the “de-friending.” You see, Facebook sees this action as a negative use of their platform, assuming that the less friends you have, or the more you delete, the less incentive you have to use the service. However, this process in fact can make a user’s experience more meaningful and for me, was just about my last attempt to keep the increasingly irrelevant “social network” a part of my online life.
Lets think back to 2004 (the year I joined Facebook). At the time, most social networks, including Facebook, relied on “connections” (e.g. making “friends”, commenting on eachother’s “walls”) as incentive to use their service. This faired well for a time, as reconnecting with old friends and family was exciting, but eventually the “social” web changed. Being “social” online became more about realtime status and geo-location updates than it did “connections.”
In an effort to keep up, Facebook copied just about every “next big thing” over the last few years. They started with photos and videos (Flickr & YouTube), then copied Twitter (status updates, and Foursquare (geo-location). Each step of the way bogging down their platform with bastardized versions of what has made the modern web great. Now, Facebook is just another feed aggregator serving up content from the over 500 “friends” (or contacts) I’ve made over the years. I use to love Facebook because it was a clean, interactive contact list of practically everyone I’ve ever met. Now it’s a constant feed of photos, videos, and status/location updates that I never asked for. If these features had always been a part of the Facebook model I would never have become “friends” with most of the people I did. I used Facebook to make “connections” and now these connections are flooding my inbox, wall, and feed with garbage I don’t care about. I may have liked the contact info for my grade school friend’s brother, but that doesn’t mean I want to see what kind of pirate they are.
What’s so great about the “follow” model vs. the “friend” model is that I’m not forced to care about the people who are interested in me. This sounds harsh, but it’s true. I don’t expect someone to follow me on Twitter if they don’t find what I have to say interesting or entertaining. So why am I expected to care what you post online just because we met once at a party, or because you dated my girlfriends best friend?
This is why I finally purged so many of my “friends” on Facebook. And while Facebook intentionally makes this process difficult in fear that it will make the experience irrelevant, I would argue it’s a last ditch effort to make the experience relevant at all.
You might ask, “Why not just delete your account if you think Facebook is such a piece of shit?” And believe me, I would love to, but unfortunately it’s a window into a lot of things that are going on with my close friends and family who are not savvy enough to use other social tools. For now I’ve given up on Facebook as a tool for making social connections online, and accepted it for the inferior realtime tool it was never meant to be.
