For example, my best friends are on the opposite coast. It's not financially realistic for us to hang out in person frequently. The 5 hours a week I could spend sending them letters or calling are not the same as 5 hours I could be spending turning acquaintances who live next door into good friends. Maybe even best friends. It's not theoretically a zero-sum game, of course, but we all know that's not how life actually works and that for one friend to have more of your time/attention means that another loses some time and attention.

What FB has helped me do is to remain easily connected to good friends and acquaintances everywhere. When moving to a new town, finding acquaintances who live there who have common interests with FB is much easier than calling those acquaintances out of the blue and hoping they'll hang out. Most of these acquaintances remain acquaintances, but some become friends -- and the cost of making those friends was substantially lowered.

For remote best friends, FB gives us a way to passively share our lives beyond calling and writing letters. Even if I had unlimited time to spend creating and sending scrapbooks and doing FaceTime, my other friends may not. It's not as good as being together, but I love the option to browse a friend's albums of past recent events on my own time, and then being able to at least experience those memories in a small way.

So I guess I see Facebook has being a very interactive rolodeck. It's not where I conduct my friendships (although I do, to some degree), it just makes maintaining friendships much more efficient. To the point that I keep connections that I would've otherwise dropped, because Facebook has reduced the long-term "maintenance cost". But since it's ultimately a rolodeck to me, I find it easy to ignore and not care what anyone is doing if I don't feel like it, and I have lowered expectations of what I should be getting from FB

I too quit around then, and I think I feel that most on my birthday. I only hear from probably a tenth the people but now when they remember on their own and text/call it means a lot more.

This is an important distinction. FB has programmed us to believe quantity is the goal, when quality probably should be. How many FB "friends" does the average user have meaningful relationships with? I'd speculate not many more than it's possible to maintain offline/without FB's "help".

"I bet all these idiots cannot tell the difference between real friends and the Facebook friend counter like I can. ;) BTW I've deleted my Facebook because I had a crippling addiction to it."

I ended up returning to Facebook and purging my "friend" list down to just a dozen actual friends.

I always wondered what my Facebook acquaintances thought when I left.

I figured they didn’t care Id left to give it much thought or that I was being a prick and had deleted them.

I'd add that the lessened noise contributes to a sense of clarity which in turn contributes to an ability to think critically on the spot.

It's not like facebook is a nightclub that will refuse re-entry once you leave or anything.