[illustrioussuit]

This is one thing I think Google+ got right. I can have different types of “friends”, each in their own categories, such as “sharaholic” or “meme poster” and only visit those circles occasionally.

The only problem is the unpopularity of G+.

[gaius]

such as “sharaholic” or “meme poster” and only visit those circles occasionally.

But people don’t fit neatly into those categories. You’ll miss an important life event from “meme boy” or “share girl” if you’ve filed them neatly away like that. G+ is unpopular because their solution to organising your friends is worse than the competition.

[KozmoNau7]

People can be in multiple circles, it's like a Venn diagram of sorts.

[gaius]

People can be in multiple circles

Sure, but how would you classify Meme Boy in circles so that you don't see his memes but you do see his important life events? Or Share Girl so you don't see what she had for lunch but do see important things?

[BeetleB]

I think the way it would naturally work on G+ is that Meme Boy will use circles this way. So if you get tired of his memes, you message him and ask him to make a Meme Circle and not include you in it.

But really, if Meme Boy enjoys posting memes, he likely already will have a Meme Circle. So you just ask him to remove you from the Meme Circle.

[KozmoNau7]

For Share Girl, you can block the pages she shares from.

For Meme Boy, a baseball bat to the kneecaps works best.

[dageshi]

That's fine?

If you look at facebook's primary purpose as a contacts manager and the secondary purpose as a "keep up with other peoples lives feed", then the primary purpose is still served even if you choose not to see everything everyone shares.

[kostarelo]

Facebook has also Friends lists which pretty much the same functionality if Im not mistaken.

[aembleton]

But it's not as easy to use. One of the things that I'd like with the friends list is to include one list inside another. When I add a friend to the sub list, it should then automatically appear in the parent list.

For example, I have a list of friends who are into hiking that live nearby. I also have a list of friends that are into hiking who live all over the world and another list of those who just live nearby.

What I want to do is add a friend to the list of friends who are into hiking that live nearby and have them automatically added to the other two lists.

[adamnemecek]

the problem with this model that sometimes the meme poster posts something that's not a meme and that's super relevant to you that you might not see.

[Bakary]

In reality the ratio of meme versus useful info is generally not in favor of spending time in this way unless you derive great utility from memes by themselves.

[dindumuffin]

Well now we need an algorithm that will make sure a relevant and engaging post gets sent to the top of your feed.

[jerkstate]

I have a different algorithm, it's called "anti-fomo"

[stinos]

Actually sounds spot-on with regards to the parent comment: by his/her logic one way to deal with social media is to make sure you see everything, else you might miss something relevant. Nerve-wrecking if you'd ask me.

On the other hand, some learning algorithm which figures out what is relevant to you sounds interesting at first but could, in my opninion, quickly lead to creating a bubble in which you only see what some algorithm considers relevant and nothing else. Now I get that some people like it that way, and in the end we all live in some kind of bubble, but still, I'd rather keep options open and actively look for new things I know nothing about.

[pbhjpbhj]

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but ... Facebook seem to classify posts as important if they get more than the usual number of peers attention, so you get major life changing announcements (births, deaths, marriages). I don't know if they solely use votes, or if they weight that with word analysis, or do something clever like matching you with other friends who upvote similar things and so boosting the chance you see posts if they upvote them (I imagine they do but perhaps use simple metrics for 'life event' indications).

[dominotw]

This is what I have on WhatsApp. The only social network I use.

[rahoulb]

I was going to say that circles work much better in WhatsApp. Mainly because you define the group/circle before you send the message