It’s like 50 to 100 SDMB members per day starting an OP in IMHO about some completely mundane topic, and then never returning to the thread again.
Oh and, two or three other people may “like” the thread, or say “me too!” or something, but that’s it.
And I only have 133 friends! How the hell can anyone keep up or care about 99% of the stuff?
Very occasionally I get a glimpse into the life of someone I care about and never see, like cousins and distant friends, but … I dunno. Maybe I don’t know how to use Facebook properly.
The best thing about Facebook is the special interest groups. I’m on a couple for local history, and many anecdotes and old photos are shared and discussed. The craziest things are friend collectors. A coworker who I barely know sent a friend request. When I looked, he had 1,133 “friends”.
And there is nothing to stop anyone from doing that. The culture of Facebook, however, from the start, was for people to accumulate as many “friends” as possible. The result is that the average “Facebook experience” is just a crappy waste of time often mixed in thoroughly with a heap of propaganda “news.”
If you’re lucky enough to cultivate a circle of friends in Facebook who actually want to engage in thoughtful discourse, then all power to you. I have found that hard to do, myself, as people like that mostly go to other forums.
With 133 friends, I am selective. Some SDMB members even.
Maybe because there’s no way to categorize topics on your wall, Like “Politics,” “Humour,” “Current Events,” ‘What I’m eating,’ “Something I just copied for the hell of it,” "Cats,’ “Other cute animals,” etc.
It’s like filling up on bread.
Sent from my adequate mobile device using Tapatalk.
My Facebook analogy is that it is more or less a gigantic global cocktail party.
You can sit on a bench and just watch. Or you can go engage people in conversation.
Yes, there is a limit to how many friends you can realistically keep up to date on, without spending a lot of time. You can un-follow people, which keeps them out of your feed unless something huge happens.
Also, don’t just join every special interest group. Pick and choose what you want to see.
How can you possibly keep up with that many friends? I have a tenth of that.
Again, maybe I’m doing something wrong, but after a day I have like 50 or 100 posts to either read or ignore, but I have to wade through them all to find out which to read and which to ignore, and obviously, some are not just posts but links to other stories.
That’s true, but once you establish a presence it’s difficult to just quit.
We’ve seen it here with posters leaving and then returning. I don’t understand the psychology, but once you establish the followings and camaraderie it’s difficult to give up, especially if you have relatives with whom you periodically keep in touch. For the most part though it’s rubbish. Which was my point.
I use it primarily for checking out memes (man, are some of them glorious) and latest news/political commentary. I also like to (window) shop for clothes, furniture, etc.
I don’t use it so much to connect with friends. Most people are not so interesting that we need to be up to date with their day-to-day activities. However posts from some friends do put a smile in my face. I notice that these are the people that post less about themselves and more about the world around us from their perspective (like a quirky pictures or a joke).
I agree. For the most part, I’m only connected to people on FB that I see or otherwise interact with regularly. Family and actual, IRL friends. I’m also connected to a few people I was close to years ago and could see myself meeting for a coffee if I happened to be in the same city with them, or at least people I’d chat with for a while if I ran into them at the mall. Then there are a few cousins I keep on my list because it would be awkward to unfriend them, but I don’t follow their posts. That gets me to 28 friends. That’s a good number for me. I get to see some pictures or jokes my real, actual friends want to share. Other than that, FB is a news source for me. I follow several news organizations and use FB to get headlines.
My wife uses FB as a combination personal and professional networking site. She has hundreds of connections and sometimes gets jealous of what her colleagues/competitors are doing. I’m like, sweetie, just unfriend them. If it’s causing stress, rethink how you’re using it.
the only reason I have a facebook account is because if you google my firstname-lastname most of what you’ll find are news stories about a convicted felon. so it’s more of a way for me to say “no, that’s not me, this is me” type of thing to e.g. prospective employers. I’m not in it to collect friends.