[DevX101]

If anyone from Facebook is reading...You guys should add a "Do you know this person?" option to friend requests received from new accounts. If the amount of negative responses to the question surpass some threshold you flag the sending account as suspicious.

[mkjones]

We have that: http://mkjon.es/friend.png. In addition to data from that, we also look at how many people click "not now" when someone adds them as a friend.

These signals (and a number of other factors) are taken into account when classifying if friend requests are spammy / malicious.

(I work on the anti-spam team at Facebook).

[michael_dorfman]

What is the difference (in practice) between clicking "not now" to an unwanted friend request, and simply ignoring it?

[joe_the_user]

The problem is that that this is where Facebook's contradictions really appear.

The problem is that Facebook needs to both maintain the fiction that it's a network for only your "real life" friends to seem safe and keeping finding new friends to keep the interest up.

But the average person only has about 150 friends and they're either currently on Facebook or they probably never will be. So to get new friends, people have to friend "friends-of-friends", people sharing common interests, people with attractive photos and so-forth. But if Facebook were to really discourage non-real-friends, everyone's friend numbers would drop and the site's excitement level would start going down.

It is a weird kind of situation... Facebook is become more like "the regular Internet" how that works out will be interesting...

[Hitchhiker]

This is a composite of previous comments, someone should hack a " Facebook is dead " essay.

Cure to the present roberry 2.0 - gear up a homomorphic scheme[1] combined with a generative personal cloud[2].

The " personal " in PC was most important when C stood for computer. Next, it will be most important when C stands for cloud.

The other wall this epic bubble is going to run against sooner or later - as people wake up at an intuitive level :

"Well, since Moore's law makes computation really cheap, let's just give away the computation, but keep the data."[3]

All of this nightmare will be compounded by the stunning crap-storm about to emerge in economies world over.

[1] - http://crypto.stanford.edu/craig/

[2] - http://futureoftheinternet.org

[3] - http://edge.org/conversation/the-local-global-flip

[ErrantX]

The new privacy/group tools are a step towards helping solve that.

It's not perfect but with a little bit of organisation you can use the same FB account for random people, casual acquaintances and real friends without causing issues.

Hopefully this will only get better.

[pavel_lishin]

> You guys should add a "Do you know this person?" option to friend requests received from new accounts.

As long as the profile is a young attractive lady, that option will rarely be chosen.

[zach]

There is already an "I don't know this person" option when declining friend requests as far as I've seen.

[Sniffnoy]

What Facebook does is to discourage people from adding people they don't know in the first place; evidently this hasn't worked. One interesting thing they used to do but don't anymore: back when they kept track of where people knew each other from, the dialog box for adding someone as a friend would ask where you knew them from, with a whole bunch of checkboxes. One was "I don't know them"; checking this would, rather than displaying boxes so you could enter more details, instead display the message "Then why are you adding them?", and change the "add friend" button to a cancel button. (I may have the exact details wrong there.)

[bkaid]

Wasn't this LinkedIn instead?

[Sniffnoy]

They may have done this also, and I have no idea who was first, but Facebook definitely did this as well. (In particular, I've never used LinkedIn.)

[modeless]

They already do this.

[100ideas]

someone should tell facebook that real friends are usually co-tagged in eachother's photos.