How many facebook friends do you have?

[Creepy-bg]

118

[aixelsyd]

too many

[The Exception]

115, manageable so far.

[Hays]

Deactivation and deletion are good for keeping my Facebook friends at zero.

[anndelise]

40
I would like to get rid of a few more, but they are the only family members I can stand, and I need to keep a couple of lines open in case there is word about my father.

[Muddy]

31, I challenge someone who isn't age 60+ to beat my record.

[Creepy-bg]

40
I would like to get rid of a few more, but they are the only family members I can stand, and I need to keep a couple of lines open in case there is word about my father.

there goes the theory that it's the extroverts who have the most (but then you live on a granola compound )

[Beautiful sky]

55 family
10 neighbors and aquaintences
12 high school 1
11 high school 2
6 junior high
5 Socionics
15 past relationships
4 current relationship
20 to 30 art and community friendship
8 best friends
about 10-20 coworkers present and past
1 author who I met on a plane on my way to Portland
3 random (please friend me cuz I think youre cute)

[glam]

almost 300 i think? my FB is currently deactivated, so can't get the exact number. my list is comprised of a few family members, some close friends, many classmates and colleagues, and lots of acquaintances i've met through events, travelling, networking opportunities, etc.

i have significantly fewer friends than many other people i know, who easily have in the high hundreds or 1000+. i don't think i'd want that many. i have enough to keep my feed active and interesting and informative, without being too overloaded with random acquaintances.

most on my list are people i wouldn't defriend, even if i barely know them. there's very few i would potentially want to remove. side note: it can be an unpleasant feeling when people defriend you, when you wouldn't have done the same...

[Creepy-bg]

side note: it can be an unpleasant feeling when people defriend you, when you wouldn't have done the same...

yes

[anndelise]

there goes the theory that it's the extroverts who have the most (but then you live on a granola compound )

Excuse me? This ain't no f'n granola compound!

I haven't even learned how to make granola . . . yet.
Though I did finish making my second cheese today.


I think there might be a correlation between number of fb friends and enneagram instincts.

[Pink]

Over 300? Used to have around 600 but deleted people that I wasn't too close with

[The Exception]

Over 300? Used to have around 600 but deleted people that I wasn't too close with

I know someone with over 3000 friends on Facebook. He requested to be friends with me when I only spoke with him once. Probably just to boost his total.

[Capitalist Pig]

95.

[Simon Ssmall]

343. It appears that is a lot.

[Aylen]

Over 300? Used to have around 600 but deleted people that I wasn't too close with

You have 300 people that you are close to?



I have just over 200 and I think I actually, irl, know about a third. Most added me because I am kind of known, for some things. in another group I used to be part of, so new people tend to add me even though I am no longer there because my legend lives on.

I accept because they are "friends" of other people I do know and I feel bad to deny a request. Sometimes if someone adds me and there are no mutual friends I just wait until their request disappears. I never really post anything personal on FB so it surprises me how much personal stuff people share. I might have years ago but I think I deleted a lot of it. If someone removed me I probably wouldn't have a clue who it was, even if it was my own family members.

[Skepsis]

Facebook friends= 0 =/ actual friends

I deleted my facebook account years ago. Signing up was a mistake, somehow thinking that adults would behave differently than teenagers. It's just another way for people to know more about you than they deserve to know.

[FDG]

something like 200-250

[Persephone]

0. Never signed up and continue resisting.

[strangeling]

0. I tried using it once, but found it annoying that people were expecting me to look at their shit. And everyone seems to mostly use it for posting images and videos; so I got rid of it. I don't see the point. If I want to talk to someone I can call/text them or write a quick email and get an immediate response or just hang out with them.

honestly, other than checking up on people you don't see or talk to anymore, what's the point?

[PistolShrimp]

250, mostly family, coworkers and college friends. I don't know why I bother reading my newsfeed though because it is like 95% pictures of babies, engagement/wedding announcements, pictures of Minions doing weird shit with weird captions, and Buzzfeed "articles" about why the 90's were the best.

[Creepy-bg]

i have maybe 4 or 5 friends who are family but we don't communicate through facebook, and a lot of them see facebook as creepy or annoying ("If i still wanted to talk to people i went to highschool with, i wouldn't have stopped being friends with them." kind of attitude hah). one of my sister-in-laws likes my stuff sometimes then deletes the likes, maybe she doesn't want any of her friends seeing what i post or doesn't want me thinking she's viewing me? so some of them do at least keep up on what i post on my wall, but it's not really used to communicate between us.

there's maybe 10 or so people who i'd say are my active irl friends, even if some of them i haven't talked too much in awhile, but we use facebook for messaging and just general facebookery, sharing lives. there has been a few weird bleed throughs between socionics people and these people, it's disconcerting to me when I see a socionics person in an irl friends friendlist, lol.

then there's a bit of a little pool of distant highschool people, childhood friends, stuff like that.


finally, a huge swarm of you guys.




i tried going to find that facebook app that went around a few years ago that would build the graphic diagram of your friend swarm and who knew who, but it looks like it's not being kept up. i wanna see it again (or what it is now)

[Pink]

You have 300 people that you are close to?

I know right? It's exhausting being so p0pular ~

lol but no, it's been quite a while since the purge and I've met quite a few new people since then. So the number keeps increasing .

[Minde]

I'm an introvert and I have *goes to check* 470 FB connections. Wow, that's more than I thought. Less than 10 are people I never really knew, like the high school girls whose prom photos I took for them a couple years ago. But they were sweet and it was a sweet gesture on their part to reach out to me, so I accepted. I don't accept connection requests from people I don't know / never met. And until recently I've even kept the connections to people here to a minimum, largely because there are a certain few here who I don't want bothering me. But something in me is changing a little, so that might change, too. My liking for most of you is starting to outweigh my caution toward the rest. *insert Bilbo-esque statement here*

I think the number jumped in the last year or so because a) I've purposefully been trying to be more social and b) something happened in my life a few months ago that brought a couple different communities into each other's circles.

I like FB and other social media because it keeps me informed of how my various friends are doing, at least on certain levels. And it allows me an avenue for certain types of self-expression (though it's oddly less about the audience and more about the expression, if that makes sense). It can be a time-suck, though, and is often full of empty inanity plus can create an information bubble. So there are pros and cons.

[FDG]

over 4,000 friends for business networking.

Business networking on facebook seems awful unless you're a rockstar?

[FDG]

I'll also throw it out there - anyone who has less than 300 friends, I consider pretty introverted and shy. Maybe that's a wrong stereotype or impression, but it's what I find, after talking with thousands of people, working in sales for years, etc. Most people can keep a social circle of up to 300 people pretty easily - if they want to. Anything less than that, it becomes a stereotype of people choosing to be more introverted, or isolate themselves, or not like people in general, etc. So I'm skeptical of all of you now who identify on this site and personality forum as an "extrovert" but have less than 100 or less than 200 friends on facebook.... seriously?? .

Maybe we have friends who don't have facebook? Maybe we don't add everyone we meet? Are you being serious here?

[Adam Strange]

Business networking on facebook seems awful unless you're a rockstar?

Networking on Facebook is anti-business, in the same way that buying machine tools from China will actually reduce your productivity.

LinkedIn is a tiny bit better.

Networking is good.

Coldcalling and showing up to talk to the CEO works best.

[Pa3s]

118. Consisting of a few family members, some internet acquaintances and mostly people I know from all the schools I attended. I met >90% irl.

[anndelise]

1) socionics Xe elements don't mean social extroversion
2) high quantity of facebook friends is not the same thing as high quality of friend interactions
3) not all of one's friends/network are necessarily signed up with facebook, nor are all of one's social interactions through facebook
4) i would expect there to be a significant number difference between enneagram instinct so-first vs so-last, and/or a difference between Fe valuing vs Fi valuing

It's estimated that humans
* can recognize and put a name to max 1500 faces
* but only turn to about 15 friends/family for confidential, more intimate discussions/interactions.

An interesting article regarding social media and friendships is
The Limits of Friendship
http://www.newyorker.com/science/mar...er-friendships
An excerpt:

With social media, we can easily keep up with the lives and interests of far more than a hundred and fifty people. But without investing the face-to-face time, we lack deeper connections to them, and the time we invest in superficial relationships comes at the expense of more profound ones. We may widen our network to two, three, or four hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up an actual friendship requires resources. “The amount of social capital you have is pretty fixed,” Dunbar said. “It involves time investment. If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.” If we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like” and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups. Traditionally, it’s a sixty-forty split of attention: we spend sixty per cent of our time with our core groups of fifty, fifteen, and five, and forty [percent] with the larger spheres. Social networks may be growing our base, and, in the process, reversing that balance.

Another interesting article:
Primates on Facebook
http://www.economist.com/node/13176775
A couple of excerpts:

"sociologists also distinguish between a person's wider network, as described by the Dunbar number or something similar, and his social “core”. Peter Marsden, of Harvard University, found that Americans, even if they socialise a lot, tend to have only a handful of individuals with whom they “can discuss important matters”.

What also struck Dr Marlow, however, was that the number of people on an individual's friend list with whom he (or she) frequently interacts is remarkably small and stable. The more “active” or intimate the interaction, the smaller and more stable the group.

Thus an average man—one with 120 friends—generally responds to the postings of only seven of those friends by leaving comments on the posting individual's photos, status messages or “wall”. An average woman is slightly more sociable, responding to ten. When it comes to two-way communication such as e-mails or chats, the average man interacts with only four people and the average woman with six. Among those Facebook users with 500 friends, these numbers are somewhat higher, but not hugely so. Men leave comments for 17 friends, women for 26. Men communicate with ten, women with 16.

What mainly goes up, therefore, is not the core network but the number of casual contacts that people track more passively. This corroborates Dr Marsden's ideas about core networks, since even those Facebook users with the most friends communicate only with a relatively small number of them.

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren't necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever.

 

One of the reasons why I have so few fb friends is because I've been working on decluttering my life, so that I can spend more energy on things/people that matter to me, and feel less tossed around by aspirations, obligations, and the demands of others. I want higher quality of interactions, rather than higher quantity of interactions.

I've always been open to adding people to my fb friend list, and still am.
But each year, just before my birthday I cull out people who either
* i don't chat with at all
* i feel no connection with
* are mentally/emotionally draining
* i am not curious enough about


Also, out of curiosity, I went over my fb friend list in similar manner as some others have done.
Family = 12 (3 I would prefer to delete; only 5 I'm interested in keeping in regular contact with)
IRL friends that are on facebook = 7
High school friends = 2 (ironically neither of whom I was particularly close to in high school)
Socionics people = 14 (3 I'm considering deleting)
Acquaintances = 7 (3 I would prefer to delete)

[The Exception]

Maximum number of Facebook friends

[blackburry]

Is it scary to view an extrovert's profile? Or is this just because of personal beef with this specific ESE?

Scary to view an extrovert's profile? I see how you might have reached that conclusion but I feel like logic should have come into play to nix that idea because it is a silly question. Perhaps you are being sarcastic. One can hope.

Also @ your post beneath that one... I hope you are also being sarcastic. That is pretty extreme simplistic, black/white thinking yo. What gives?

[Skepsis]

Just think, 12 years ago, not even the most extroverted person in the world had any facebook friends.

I offer two new information elements, selected by environmental pressures: There is FBi and FBe.

[anndelise]

I'll take FBi

Edited add: nvm, i can't be a FBi cuz I'm constantly on fb liking and sharing and commenting to friends.
FBx?

[glam]

1) socionics Xe elements don't mean social extroversion
2) high quantity of facebook friends is not the same thing as high quality of friend interactions
3) not all of one's friends/network are necessarily signed up with facebook, nor are all of one's social interactions through facebook
4) i would expect there to be a significant number difference between enneagram instinct so-first vs so-last, and/or a difference between Fe valuing vs Fi valuing

i like this list but i'm not sure if Fe valuing vs Fi valuing is very significant in this respect - i think instincts might be more related, and socionics introversion/extraversion aren't totally irrelevant either IMO. i know some LSEs, IEEs, and SEEs who have many, many more friends on FB than i probably would ever have. and thinking of a type like LII - i don't see them having more friends on average than a reasonably social Fi-valuing extravert.

as an sp/so, i value having Facebook connections with people, not to maintain close relationships, but to know i have that potential contact with them. also i genuinely enjoy seeing a lot of the posts, photos and articles they may share, even if i never comment on or like them. for those acquaintances who are interested in the same things i am, or who are in my field - i like that FB shows me what events they are attending, and what groups they are a part of, because chances are i will be interested in them as well. many of my acquaintances on FB whom i don't know well IRL are people whom i would like to get to know better if i ever had the chance to see them again IRL. if i didn't have that FB connection with them, i would lose that potential, because of having no other way to contact them.

btw my FB is currently deactivated, but i view it this as very temporary. i'm kind of going through a withdrawn period, but once i come out of it, i know i'm going to want to get back on FB.

One of the reasons why I have so few fb friends is because I've been working on decluttering my life, so that I can spend more energy on things/people that matter to me, and feel less tossed around by aspirations, obligations, and the demands of others. I want higher quality of interactions, rather than higher quantity of interactions.

I've always been open to adding people to my fb friend list, and still am.
But each year, just before my birthday I cull out people who either
* i don't chat with at all
* i feel no connection with
* are mentally/emotionally draining
* i am not curious enough about

this is really different to how i think about and use FB. i don't view having many connections as "clutter", and i don't need to have close contact or frequent interaction with people to value the connection with them. there are a few people who defriended me before - while we were not close friends, they were people whom i had some good conversations with IRL, and who occasionally "liked" my posts and such. these people defriended me not long after we lost regular IRL contact (not because of any animosity, just from going different directions in life), and i found this unpleasant when i realized what happened. i didn't want to lose contact with them, i liked them genuinely as people, and it didn't feel good to know that they didn't value that connection (however superficial) enough with me to keep it up. i wouldn't have removed them. these people i'm talking about were all people i had long before typed as Delta, btw. i wonder if this is some Fi aristocratic thing, where one carefully designates who is in their Fi circle and who isn't, idk. i wouldn't be surprised now if they used some similar criteria to yours when deciding to defriend people.

[Creepy-bg]

i've never felt a need to cull my friends list, but i have hidden people from showing up in my feed.

[glam]

i've never felt a need to cull my friends list, but i have hidden people from showing up in my feed.

yea, when people regularly go through and delete friends, or talk about "cleaning up" their friends list, this sounds really foreign to me after thinking about it though, i could see myself doing this, but it would happen only periodically (not yearly like many people do), when i've moved on to a different place in my life. i've only had FB since 2013, and there's very few i would consider deleting right now, but i could see that changing in another few years, maybe?

also there are some people whom, if they deleted me, it wouldn't bother me. it's people whom i have felt some kind of good connection or potential for connection IRL that i'm mostly interested in keeping as friends on FB. i can't fully separate the online and IRL connections (hard to explain), even though there is a difference. those closest to me don't need FB to keep in contact with me. but for those i don't know well or whom i haven't seen in a long time, most of the time FB is the only way they'd be able to contact me.

[Minde]

i've never felt a need to cull my friends list, but i have hidden people from showing up in my feed.

There's only one person (that I can remember) who I hid from my timeline but kept as a friend. A long time ago, awhile after the first friending frenzy when FB became a thing, I removed several people who I knew wouldn't miss me. I think one time I removed a friend's old boyfriend, more out of solidarity with the friend than anything else. And I've blocked one person for being... confrontational and insane, that might be one way of putting it. I felt a bit bad and wish I didn't have to, but *any* contact just encouraged him to keep trying to engage me. (Literally engage me. He said God said we are supposed to marry...)

I block all games.



To add on to what I said earlier, one of the reasons I like social media is that it allows me to connect, share, interact, encourage, learn, etc. with people who live outside of my physical interaction range. Like I have friends I've made in my travels or friends who used to live near me and now live far away. As @anndelise' research indicates, it's not a large number or at high frequencies, but some of these even limited interactions are valuable, even precious, to me. On the other hand, for the friends who I physically see every week, social media can sort of supplement the experience sometimes. Like I have one friend I see every Sunday, but I love seeing pictures and reading stories of her horse and goats. Or a friend posts a link to an article that piqued his interest, and next time I see him we talk about it.

[anndelise]

as an sp/so, i value having Facebook connections with people, not to maintain close relationships, but to know i have that potential contact with them. also i genuinely enjoy seeing a lot of the posts, photos and articles they may share, even if i never comment on or like them. for those acquaintances who are interested in the same things i am, or who are in my field - i like that FB shows me what events they are attending, and what groups they are a part of, because chances are i will be interested in them as well. many of my acquaintances on FB whom i don't know well IRL are people whom i would like to get to know better if i ever had the chance to see them again IRL. If i didn't have that FB connection with them, i would lose that potential, because of having no other way to contact them.

btw my FB is currently deactivated, but i view it this as very temporary. i'm kind of going through a withdrawn period, but once i come out of it, i know i'm going to want to get back on FB.

this is really different to how i think about and use FB. i don't view having many connections as "clutter", and i don't need to have close contact or frequent interaction with people to value the connection with them. there are a few people who defriended me before - while we were not close friends, they were people whom i had some good conversations with IRL, and who occasionally "liked" my posts and such. these people defriended me not long after we lost regular IRL contact (not because of any animosity, just from going different directions in life), and i found this unpleasant when i realized what happened. i didn't want to lose contact with them, i liked them genuinely as people, and it didn't feel good to know that they didn't value that connection (however superficial) enough with me to keep it up. i wouldn't have removed them. these people i'm talking about were all people i had long before typed as Delta, btw. i wonder if this is some Fi aristocratic thing, where one carefully designates who is in their Fi circle and who isn't, idk. i wouldn't be surprised now if they used some similar criteria to yours when deciding to defriend people.

I held back from joining facebook for a number of years. I prefered chat programs.

When I finally got on facebook I contacted old high school and childhood friends, extended family, etc. I quickly had over 120 and more being added. I also quickly got overwhelmed from hundreds of likes, shares, status updates, etc. Twice a day it would take me half an hour to get all caught up. By the time I was caught up, I'd be mentally and emotionally exhausted. Little of it was interesting to me, and it all kept hiding the likes/shares/photos/updates/etc from the people I was actually interested in renewing friendships with. Add in that the facebook app for ipad keeps changng the order of stuff from the newsfeed, making it even harder to enjoy my actual friends. Yes, I could have simply unfollowed people, instead of unfriending them. But I saw no reason to keep many of them, there was just nothing there, not even potentially there. The number eventually dropped down to 90.

Over time of interacting with those who were closer friends from high school, it became clear that I had taken a different path than most of them. I couldn't share anything on fb because it would offend most of them. If I supported Planned Parenthood, some of my fb friends would take it as an affront to their religious beliefs, as if I was attacking them personally. If I expressed support for same-sex marriage, they would attack me, and attack my friends who also supported same-sex marriage. I go onto fb to relax and connect, not to walk on eggshells. So I deleted almost 30 of these people.

I deleted family members who couldn't or wouldn't stop posting intimate details of my past on my public wall instead of in private messages.

And then, I started to get serious about decluttering from my life people who brought me down all the f'n time, those full of negativity, who emotionally manipulated me and their other friends, those who took took took offering nothing back, those who I dreaded to hear from, who drained me or made me want to flee from even minor interactions with them.

And then my newsfeed started to feel more positive, more interesting, more relaxing. It didn't mean the friends I kept agreed with me, nor I them, but I did look forward to seeing what they would post. And, I felt I could finally express myself without offending everyone. I no longer feel as if I have to walk on eggshells on my fb interactions.

Of the 42 friends I have on fb, most of them I rarely interact with, and when do, it's superficially. Either they aren't active, or we've not shared anything the other is interested in commenting on. But I keep them on because I'm still curious about them. Unfortunately, now I'm one of the people overwhelming their newsfeed with a bunch of likes, shares, etc. I don't care if they unfollow me, though. It does usually mean that there's fewer interactions that way, which eventually leads to disinterest on my part. But not always.

And I still get a huge amount on my newsfeed which I check multiple times a day when I'm taking a break from garden/house work. It's now a nice balance of passive with active, but I'm still open to adding to it. Each time I've made an effort to leave this forum I've contacted people from here and given them my fb name. I'm just a little more aware now of what won't work for me, based on those previous fb experiences mentioned above.

[Narc]

350ish.

I've been getting extremely irritated with it, and I've downloaded a Facebook Chat program so I don't have to see the News Feed anymore.

[Satan]

Maybe we have friends who don't have facebook? Maybe we don't add everyone we meet? Are you being serious here?

he's got a baised sample set of people who work in sales etc.