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Because the real world isn't like that. Facebook treats friendship as something binary. You're friends or you're not. Friendships don't work that way, though.

by jowiar 13y ago

Because the real world isn't like that. Facebook treats friendship as something binary. You're friends or you're not. Friendships don't work that way, though. You don't usually wake up and suddenly become "not friends" with someone. You drift apart one minute at a time. Maybe someone moves, gets married, has kids. Someone else moves. Someone gets divorced, switches jobs, goes to graduate school on the other side of the world. By the end of all this, someone who you once spent time with every day is not really a part of your life anymore, but you can't really point to a moment when "it" happened.

xxchan 13y ago
And at one point this relationship is better described as "not friends" rather than "friends". It's typically mutual so I don't see a problem here.
- afterburner 13y ago
  It's typically not exactly mutual, that's the whole problem. Persons A and B may drift apart, but maybe B thinks they're drifting apart slower than A think. Friendship goes in both directions, with different values in each direction, not identical ones.
commanderkeen08 13y ago
Agreed. Facebook also treats the "Friendship" status as meaning, more or less, "I'm really interested in what this person has to say about everything." And that's not always the case. I've removed people simply because I was tired of seeing pictures of their kids on my News Feed or people arguing back and forth about marijuana legalization legislation. It doesn't mean I don't consider them to be my friend. I know there's a whole set of settings one can go through to limit the content you see from certain people, etc. etc. but that's also another huge problem with Facebook in general. They take it upon themselves to decide for you which friends are more deserving of your attention. 90% of the time, it's never right. I consider myself a pretty tech savy guy and even I couldn't be bothered trying to understand how to do something like that. It's easier, for a lot of people, to just remove someone from their daily news feed. I used Social Fixer for this feature alone. I used it because the way I use Facebook (and everyone uses Facebook differently) is to keep in touch with old friends, the friends that moved, got married, graduated. I feel deceptively connected to these people even though I'm not because I have a way to sort of keep tabs without having to keep tabs on them. When they stop appearing in my news feed, they traverse into that vague friend/not-friend category and I'm left wondering what Tom has been up to all these years. Social Fixer usually would let me know that Tom has actually deleted his Facebook account and that's why he has appeared to vanish from my digital life. Sometimes it told me that Jane has unfriended me and I was left assuming Jane got tired of all the gifs I was posting.

by jowiar 13y ago

xxchan 13y ago

And at one point this relationship is better described as "not friends" rather than "friends". It's typically mutual so I don't see a problem here.

afterburner 13y ago
It's typically not exactly mutual, that's the whole problem. Persons A and B may drift apart, but maybe B thinks they're drifting apart slower than A think. Friendship goes in both directions, with different values in each direction, not identical ones.

commanderkeen08 13y ago

Agreed. Facebook also treats the "Friendship" status as meaning, more or less, "I'm really interested in what this person has to say about everything." And that's not always the case. I've removed people simply because I was tired of seeing pictures of their kids on my News Feed or people arguing back and forth about marijuana legalization legislation. It doesn't mean I don't consider them to be my friend. I know there's a whole set of settings one can go through to limit the content you see from certain people, etc. etc. but that's also another huge problem with Facebook in general. They take it upon themselves to decide for you which friends are more deserving of your attention. 90% of the time, it's never right. I consider myself a pretty tech savy guy and even I couldn't be bothered trying to understand how to do something like that. It's easier, for a lot of people, to just remove someone from their daily news feed. I used Social Fixer for this feature alone. I used it because the way I use Facebook (and everyone uses Facebook differently) is to keep in touch with old friends, the friends that moved, got married, graduated. I feel deceptively connected to these people even though I'm not because I have a way to sort of keep tabs without having to keep tabs on them. When they stop appearing in my news feed, they traverse into that vague friend/not-friend category and I'm left wondering what Tom has been up to all these years. Social Fixer usually would let me know that Tom has actually deleted his Facebook account and that's why he has appeared to vanish from my digital life. Sometimes it told me that Jane has unfriended me and I was left assuming Jane got tired of all the gifs I was posting.