[Groxx]

My wife has the same issue with it. She gets too bound up in the day-to-day, and feels too obligated to keep up to date, which the site makes nearly impossible to do efficiently.

Then there's the typical drama on any social network, the annoyances with closed systems (we're happy with email and caldav, thanks, anything can use them!), and the endless, endless spam on the news feed. I always hid the feed with my user CSS file, and stayed on top of it, but she'd get roped back in when it occasionally broke. Being social is addictive, and she's more social than I am.

[mkjones]

Sorry to hear you found the newsfeed so spammy - I work at Facebook on keeping spam out of the feed (and off the site in general), and I'm curious what you found most annoying. I'd love to work on reducing it, as it probably annoys other folks too.

[Groxx]

Oh, it's a systemic issue, for the most part. And it's not so much actual spam as it is social spam. Facebook revolves heavily around pushing information towards your attention, and I'm very much a pull-oriented person with rare exceptions.

As to my CSS {display:none;}, though, I ended up distributing it to a large portion of my friends. The overall consensus was (and likely is, though this is mostly before the ability to categorize things) that the feed is:

A) too addicting, because it pulls you back in when you could be doing something else. There's always something interesting going on when you have a lot of connections, and you can't remove connections or risk offending people (though that's largely fixed now). Its mere presence is a threat to being productive, which ends up leaving you feeling like you wasted your day.

and B) utterly crammed with irrelevant information (app this, lame-quote-status-update that, drinking-photos those), so the bits you actually wish to keep up on get lost in the sea or pushed off the end of the world (page 2). I recognize this is a largely un-solvable problem, as everyone is different, but the tool-set simply isn't there to even manage it efficiently.

So it ends up being the zeitgeist of things you're not involved in and you either want to be in on or you want to just shut up. With the occasional relevant flotsam that keeps you checking it through all the failing times.

Last I saw, things had improved somewhat, with the most important step being lists of friends. But I've been out of it for a couple years now, so some of the gripes may not be overly relevant.

[mkjones]

Gotcha. I guess I'm glad it's not straight up malicious spam (woohoo! I'm doing my job!), but rather an (admittedly tougher-to-solve) quality issue.

That being said, I think the folks working on feed ranking have done quite a lot of awesome stuff over the last couple years (most of which shouldn't require any explicit work on your part other than using the site) - I'd be curious what you thought if your account was still around and you gave it another shot for a few weeks.

[imjustatechguy]

I think my social circle is less active and less dramatic than yours. I guess that means that I am boring and my friends are also relatively boring.

I guess different social circles are different and it probably varies by age group as well.

I find your comments interesting because it is so completely different than my social world.

I should also add that I don't find it addictive at all.

[Groxx]

This is throughout college, so add annoyance about normal college stupidity and a dash of escapism. Though I'm not sure what your age is, so it could be you're in that situation.

I don't find it particularly addicting either, but to each their own. I'd be willing to bet there are at least as many FB addicts as WOW addicts, though.