My big disappointment with facebook is the fact that I can’t say anything I want to friends because there might be parents, kids, whatever, looking at it. Kind of defeats the reason I joined up in the first place. So far I’ve been able to avoid facebook family entanglements (I love 'em, but there’s a line…). I like seeing everybody’s pictures. The constant game updates I can do without.
I could have almost written your OP, otternell. I was on Facebook, but once people I don’t particularly like started friending me (and just denying their friend request seemed cold to me), I dropped that old account and started a new one with only my husband and two other people I like knowing about it. Unfortunately Facebook has ratted me out, so more people are clamouring for friending again, but since I never go there any longer, I don’t see them. Yeah, I don’t like Facebook. My husband is on it, and he tells me things he thinks I need to know - I don’t have to go and read about everyone doing boring things I don’t care about every day.
Once upon a time everyone had to have a CB radio.
'nuff said.
My husband has a facebook account and I don’t, which is a weird inversion of our usual dynamic of me as the friendly sociable one and him as the den-dwelling hermit. When he created it he sort of intended it as a family account, the picture is of both of us and our kids and he gave me all the login information.
Maybe up to half of the people who have friended him are actually MY friends and family, so lurking on the account, which I only think to do once in a blue moon, gives me a fairly accurate idea of what it would be like if I had one.
Doesn’t appeal, especially the whole “worlds collide” issue so many have brought up. I kind of get a kick out of the status line (or whatever it’s called) and I think a lot of people are really clever with it and make me laugh, but I can’t think of too many random fabulous thoughts that I want to share with EVERYBODY. That’s why I use email to connect with my friends. I often send particular people or groups of people status-line-like emails.
I also don’t like the ability to inadvertently look like a loser. Something like 50 percent of the “news feed” my husband gets is this one girl we went to college with and last saw, seriously, like 20 years ago. Just the sheer level of her activity makes her look pretty lame, but the content achieves that goal just fine too. What if that were me?
And then there’s the “whole new realm to be socially awkward” in aspect. I can’t tell you how many conversations about getting a friend request from somebody you don’t want to be friends with I have heard in the last year.
I just don’t really see a point to facebook. I am in contact with the people I want to be in contact with, at the level I want.
So I’m with you, and I’m no antisocial hermit.
I don’t really “get” Facebook, either. I use it a bit, but often the things that I might want to post for some of my friends to read, I don’t want work colleagues who have “friended” me to see, and vice versa.
Plus, every time I log on, there are about 20 new “updates” from people I barely know, talking about their dull lives. I know you can hide status updates etc from various people, but it all just seems so vacuous. The infantilisation of society: “Oooh, look at what I’ve been doing!”
If you want to be reachable by other people. I consider it basically like being in the phone book. I may end up marrying an old (18 year ago) acquaintance I reconnected with on Facebook. She saw me, iniatiated conversation, we hit it off, now we’re seriously dating. Probably getting married.
I use it as an occasional tool to say “Hi” to people who I do want to stay in touch with, that I don’t normally see (live far away), but don’t necessarily want to just call up and ask them what’s up. I go on there maybe once a week or so, and occasionally I’ll see something someone’s said or posted or whatever, and I can post a comment and share a laugh with them or whatever. I can also see if/when anything major happens in their lives.
I don’t use it much – maybe twice a month, and I do have to set it up so that I don’t see all the crap from the people I don’t care about.
Ok, HOW do you prevent a certain group of friends from seeing some/particular status updates (not blocking them from ALL updates, not blocking them from the entire wall (which they would notice and drama would ensue), but just from individual updates)-- is it possible? If not, why oh why not!?
Eh, not. After like getting 50 random updates and none of it meaningful, I sort of stopped checking it. Life has gotten a bit too busy for me, and I find the SDMB more interesting anyway.
I set up an account, played with it for a few months, then disabled the account and never looked back. I got sick of the Mafia requests and quizzes and obnoxiously partisan crap from some of my friends.
What really was telling to me- only one person emailed me to ask why I closed my account. So much for “friends”
I’m thinking of leaving too, for the exact same reasons (excepting the kids), for what it’s worth. It’s slowly lowering my opinions of some of my friends, due to the asinine shit they post, which can’t be helping out our relationships. This is the first time I’ve admitted it in public, because when I told my brother, he berated me for not liking it, called me closed-off and unwilling to make myself available (even despite the fact that I was actually using it, and told only him I didn’t like it at the time), and acts like it’s brain surgery uphill both ways in the snow to call or email me instead to keep in touch.
Instead of posting the message to your wall, send it as a private FB message to those particular FB friends that you want to read it.
As others pointed out, you can. I have friends, my girlfriend and her friends, family, coworkers, randoms and old acquaintaneces I haven’t seen since high school as “friends”. Not everyone gets to see the intimate details of my life. In fact, if I barely know you, you really can’t see much other than a photo and some very basic info. Closer friends enjoy a magical world of hilareous photos and exciting and enriching comments and activities.
oops, move on, nothing to see here…
Same here, except that I’ve yet to hear from anyone asking why I closed my account.
I am curious as to how do I block wall posts from a list of ‘contacts’. It’s filling my notifications with lots of stuff.
its very interesting how there really are quite a few of us who don’t “get” it. I guess I could have done this as a poll - but as you can see I am relatively new to actually posting on SDMB and it just didn’t occur to me until now. (Been lurking and laughing here for years!)
Though the way some people strategically use their privacy settings might be helpful if I ever got back on. Thanks for sharing the good tips! But I think SDMB might be a better replacement for me anyway! 
If you go to the lower right corner on your page there is a Help button. Underneath this is a subcatagory Using Facebook and there is a button called Wall. Click this and on the next page click How to Use the Wall Feature. On the resultant page are how you adjust all the settings on who can and can’t see your info.
Join the club.
I was thinking about starting a thread when I found this one.
It seems that suddenly, in the past 3 or 4 weeks, I have been invited to join Facebook by lots and lots of people who I rarely, if ever, have any contact with - and certainly don’t want them mingling with my other friends.
Listen - if some of you like inviting everybody you know to read everything from everybody you know - fine. However, I don’t particularly want my students to read stuff from my weird family, nor do I want co-workers to post where ex-lovers and ex-employers post, nor do I want the Republican family members putting in their two cents to comments from my screaming liberal friends and…
…all in all, Facebook is turning into the house party from hell.
I second mostly ignoring it. That is what I do.
As someone who lives far, far away from where I grew up and went to college it is really neat to make contact with people who I haven’t spoken to for a while. Some of them have moved close to me relatively speaking (if I’m ever in Vancouver there are a couple of people I’d visit for a beer, etc), and I might not have known outside of Facebook.
But that is the extent of my usage. I see a lot of my contacts are really into it and playing stupid games (I really don’t care about your lost sheep in “Farmville”) that show up on my screen, but that is easy to ignore. So for me, it just sits there for occasional use to talk to people from time to time that I don’t see on a regular basis. I’ve never been asked by anyone “why don’t you Facebook more?”, but if I was I’d just say “I’m not really into it”. I don’t think I know anyone where that wouldn’t end that conversation.
Same thing happened with me. It didn’t really appeal to me.