I bet you would have just as many friends without facebook. That's limited by your capacity to make friends, not the social media you use.

Social media expands one's capability to make (and more importantly, keep) friends, especially if one's busy and/or not an extrovert.

The idea that social media can do this is the central conceit of facebook. A friendship maintained solely because of an entry in a database is not the same as one driven by the memories of the participants. You are not extending your ability to make friends. You are engaging in something fundamentally different from friendship.

Look at the effects--- facebook depresses people, but meeting real people in real life makes us happy. You will say you need facebook to know where the next party is and meet those people, but that's like saying you need to smoke to meet people at bars.

Friendship isn't a token. It's a continued process of communication and exchange. You are not extending your capacity for friendship by submitting your life details to a social network.

EDIT: grammar

With regards to the original guy who said he went to social events from Facebook, you completely missed the point.

I disagree. Let me go point-by-point.

> A friendship maintained solely because of an entry in a database is not the same as one driven by the memories of the participants.

First of all, Facebook isn't about having friendships "maintained solely because of an entry in a database". There are other social networks for that (e.g. Twitter, Instagram, etc.). Facebook is designed to mirror your real-life social network (and the company itself actively pushes against deviating too much from that use). It's a tool that helps you maintain existing frienships, keep weak ties and incubate them if needed so that they may grow to real friendships. But the difference between "weak ties" and "actual friends" is very much dependent on your off-line activity.

> You are not extending your ability to make friends.

That's why I corrected myself to shift the focus on keeping friendships. Because that's what Facebook really is - a self-updating address book that lets you pull regular updates on what people you know are doing. It doesn't really help you make friends out of strangers. But it helps tremendously in keeping ties to people you know.

> You are engaging in something fundamentally different from friendship.

True, but I'd say it's something more. It's an enhancement, an additional aspect. At least that's how it works for my (real-life) friends and me.

> Look at the effects--- facebook depresses people, but meeting real people in real life makes us happy.

This I strongly disagree with, because for me it's the other way around! I'm an introvert[0], I find too much face-to-face interaction depressing and even irritating. But I do get a lot of fun from talking with people on-line, especially in an async mode. So e-mail, Facebook and Hacker News are a big win for me.

> You will say you need facebook to know where the next party is and meet those people, but that's like saying you need to smoke to meet people at bars.

It's all context-dependent. People who use Facebook to communicate will organize parties by starting events on Facebook. People who use other means of communication will utilize those to organize the same parties. When you see someone saying that they need Facebook to be aware of social gatherings, it only means that they and their friends are all prefering Facebook as a tool for coordinating those gatherings. It's a lock-in effect, true, but it doesn't mean its bad.

> Friendship isn't a token. It's a continued process of communication and exchange.

Indeed. And Facebook is an awesome communication and exchange tool that works perfectly for a great subset of population.

[0] - people don't believe me because I like to give public talks and have pretty well-developed social skills, but that only means they don't understand what being an introvert means; I love people, but in small doses, with enough time off to recharge. See [1] for explanation.

[1] - http://imgur.com/gallery/sZmXr1J

I'll cancel your anecdote with one of my own: If facebook hadn't existed, my life would not have been different at all. I don't use it, never have.

But so many people around you do. I don't use it either, but it still affects many around me.

It would have been different, you'd never spend the time to write a reply :)

I have severely cut back my usage of Facebook over the last 12 months. I forced myself to try to use it as much as some of my friends, a small subset of whom seem to use it obsessively to post trivial updates on their thoughts and actions dozens of times a day.

I just found myself annoyed by the sheer quantity of non-content, vacuous feel-good stories or images, links to click-bait articles or just outright ignorance and stupidity from people I wouldn't have otherwise suspected that about.

I removed my family and colleagues from my account a very long time ago. It very quickly became clear to me that having anyone like that on there was a grave mistake. Sure enough I was given some tired rants about how I was heartless to have removed them from my list ha ha. That's how seriously some people take this. It's bizarre to me. None of these people need to know anything about what I am doing socially with my friends.

I still have an account but I basically just check it once or twice a week for maybe less than a minute to see if I have any private messages or event invites. A few of my closer friends use Facebook messages as a primary method to organise meetups for board games or drinks and the like.

Since basically cutting down my usage to a few minutes every few days I can't say I've noticed any difference in my social life, but I've definitely noticed a decrease in the amount of inane rubbish my mind has to process from the News Feed.

I have maybe 180 people on the friends list and I'm starting to realise that I could quite happily go the rest of my life without speaking to perhaps 75% of them ever again. I'm not even sure why I accepted their friend requests in the first place. Maybe I was just caufght up in Facebook as a new experience initially.

I tried to use it years ago and found that every time I used it, I came away from the site in a much worse mood than when I entered it. I started arguments with and began to loathe my relatives. I realized my friends can't spell basic English words or compose complete thoughts. I don't care about baby pictures or what you ate for lunch, so my time was wasted. My life was actively made worse by its existence, so I stopped using it.

You made a right choice. Compare with me, for whom Facebook improves my relationship with family. It lets me correct my friends' occasional lapses in spelling, it only rarely displays baby pictures (which I abhore), doesn't show anyone's lunch (aren't you confusing FB with Instagram here?). Which helps me maintain weak ties with hundreds of people - ties which sometimes turn into much stronger ones, and that wouldn't be physically possible to maintain without Facebook. Which is another place for HN-quality-level discussions with both friends and strangers.

Facebook is a different thing for different people; I think it's as good to you as you're willing to maintain it. Also, if you have crappy friends in real life, you'll have crappy friends on Facebook.

Yeah, it definitely requires maintenance that I'm not willing to put in. Just too much garbage to sort through and throw out for way too little meaningful signal.

I wonder about two possible reasons for the difference between you and me (as representatives of classes of people who like and dislike Facebook, respectively):

1) When did you start using it? I remember starting quite early, so maybe the well-maintained garden comes from the fact I did it gradually over the years, so I didn't notice the work?

2) It may be simply that Facebook caters well only to some lifestyles, while it conflicts with another. And/or personality types; I think I've noticed that the more extrovert people tend to use Facebook a little less - mostly to share funny stuff and coordinate the next real-life party. All the interesting discussions I have on Facebook are usually held with people who, like myself, aren't very party-going.

It's a good question. I often wonder if I'm missing out on valuable relationships and stuff by not using it. But then when I do use it, I get frustrated and regret having used it. My stream could be summed up as baby photos; right-wing political nonsense; image macros; and pithy one-line comments with no meaning to me. I don't want any of that.

I never really "used it" for any length of time, just a few weeks or a month or two. This was probably 5 years ago. I still have the account, but I log in maybe once or twice a year. I basically accept everyone I've met IRL, because it'd be rude not to (right? I don't know the etiquette). I know there are muting controls and stuff, but that's already more effort than I care to spend given I see no benefit.

I'm quite introverted. I'd say I have about 10 people I'd call friends, and even fewer that I talk to on a monthly basis. I have my own sources of finding entertainment, and I don't like parties; I go to three or four a year and host one or two myself. That's plenty for me.

It just doesn't fulfill any purpose in my life and actively makes me angry.

(To be clear, I'm just describing my own situation, not expressing any sense of superiority.)

Thanks for the detailed description of your experience.

I don't like framing the issue in terms of "missing out". It leads to the "paradox of choice"-type worrying. There are always more interesting and fulfilling things to do than hours in a day. You seem to have developed a good social life framework for yourself that doesn't include Facebook, so I wouldn't say you're missing out.

As for stream, if mine looked like that I'd be unhappy too. You could probably clean up yours quickly though - just scroll through it and/or visit profile pages of some of your friends, and start "liking"/commenting on posts that you find interesting. Facebook filtering algos will quickly catch on your interest, and you'll be seeing much less crap.

RE etiquette, as far as I can tell you're correct; generally you accept people you met IRL, with rare exceptions of both kinds - sometimes you don't really like your new acquaintance, and other times you may decide to add someone you met on-line if you know them well enough already. At least that's how I myself and people I know use Facebook - maybe the culture is slightly different in other parts of the world. But the rule of thumb seems to be: if you think the person is OK and you might want to talk some more in the future, it's OK to send/accept a Facebook friendship invite.

> It just doesn't fulfill any purpose in my life and actively makes me angry.

That's totally fine and, IMO, a perfectly good reason to not use Facebook.

I never thought of treating it as liking things I like, instead of banishing things I don't. Interesting...

Facebook needs to have some data about your preferences in order to filter effectively; the most direct interactions you can make that send this signal are liking, commenting and sharing[0]. The most directly observable result of those is that similar content to the one you "approved" will be shown much more often for some time. From my observations[1], Facebook seems to do some kind of an exponential filtering (think e^-x) - things similar (or from the same person) to those you liked will initially show up much more often, but their rate will quickly diminish. But then, if this was a good guess on Facebook's part then you're more likely to "like" some of those posts, which sustains the effect. Another example would be "forgetting curves".

It may sound crude, but it is pretty effective. They make sure that you mostly see things you're interested with, sprinkled with some other stuff - because a) you might find it important too, but they don't know, and b) everyone changes their interests from time to time.

[0] - Yes, there're options to signal "please don't show me this kind of stuff" or "don't show me stuff from this person", but I use them so rarely I don't really know if they work in any other way than just blacklisting the thing/person you pointed out.

[1] - I've noticed this directly after liking a post under a fanpage I basically never interacted with. I suddenly saw their posts everyday. Then every other day. Then every few days. Another like, and they're back to showing up daily for a while.

And instead, you'd still have time to sleep, for hobbies; you could attend to less events for a longer time, or have meaningful conversations with fewer people.

But true, a lot of friends with the ability to press a button or to select and emoji to communicate is way better.

I'm picking up your cynicism and I've got plenty of complaints about Facebook myself (mostly related to how it's a closed-off system that requires you to use their service to communicate with people, unlike email where you can choose your provider/host and still communicate with people who prefer others).

That said, the idea that you automatically use such services for shallow, mass communication with large numbers of fleeting friends is sort of disingenuous. I keep an account there because like many people, it's a fairly effective way to coordinate with friends and family without creating long email chains or massive group texts.

Not everyone is trying to be a social butterfly, resigning themselves to quantity over quality or neglecting sleep and hobbies. Plenty of us have people we'd like to keep in touch with and a place to announce events (cookouts or parties we're holding, concerts or camping trips we're attending, etc) so our other friends and acquaintances can find out about them and join us in person.

I've currently got a closed group on there where 4 or 5 of us have been sharing our progress on some neat electronic art projects we're working on. It's not something we use at the expense of hobbies and interests but rather a common tool for us to casually collaborate and share the things we're interested in and working on.

So yeah, I'd love if I could use Google+ or some other service where I like the interface and features better and I'd love if that didn't require everyone to "jump ship" at the same time. A common protocol between social forums (again, like email) would go a long way toward addressing the complaints I have with them.

But since that's not likely to happen, I'll take occasionally checking my Facebook accounts for things people have shared with me over missing out on those conversations due to distance or personal time constraints. I don't live on Facebook but I stop by a few times a week when I feel like looking at Facebook. Haven't lost any sleep over it yet and I've developed quite a few hobbies around the communication that FB and other services foster.