Because the entire premise is wrong

> It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list—but removing someone from your friends list is practically a declaration of war.

It really isn't that bad as he makes it out to be. End of discussion.

I think it's more about the fact that the addition is publicised while the removal is silent, combined with EdgeRank hiding most of your fb-friends' activity by default, hence "smoothing" the departure.

PersonYouDontCareAbout (PYDCA) adds you, you accept, he enjoys the add, a few days pass, you remove him. Because PYDCA wasn't really paying attention to you (his feed is full of other people's activity, supposedly more relevant to his interests), he doesn't notice. A few months pass, he forgets everything about you. Even if he remembers, he'll just think he never added you in the end. Even if he remembers and knows he's added you, you simply don't bump into each other so much that he might care.

What is really, really awkward is when he adds you, you do this dance, and then FB keeps reminding him every day that he should add you. FB should have a button "this guy doesn't care" and stop trying to make me look awkward.

Just after you silently remove PYDCA you also add them to the block list, and they never see you again.

I agree with the article that it is socially awkward. For now I try to beat this game by not playing - that is, leaving distant acquaintances in a perpetual unanswered request state. I realize Facebook may not let me refuse to play, forever.

The same awkwardness applies to unfollowing people you know on Twitter, especially because they could be using a service that lets them know. Except since I have to play that game, I just play it and don't worry about it. Can't say how most others play, though.

"It really isn't that bad as he makes it out to be. End of discussion."

You say that as though you'd definitively disproved the premise, instead of just saying "nuh-uh."

Citation?

In case the question was not tongue-in-cheek, what's the citation for the original premise? I have trouble imagining what would be a citation for "(dis)proving" that something is socially awkward.

> You say that as though you'd definitively disproved the premise, instead of just saying "nuh-uh."

He raises an hypothesis without any evidence. As Hitchens said: Anything asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

4 years have passed since the article, Facebook haven't been affected much by the situation described therein, much less it has been "killed".

Citations are only needed when you cannot directly observe some reality for yourself. Here we can: it was a prediction, it never came off, _thus_ it was wrong. End of story.

Who said it has to happen within four years?

There's a lot of FB support in these comments, that FB has somehow solved these problems. I suppose I disagree. This article rang true to me, and it's exactly why I stopped using it, in 2012.

I can't speak for others' situations, but when I started using FB I had decided I was going to use it to maintain relationships with a select few close friends. As time went on, a few acquaintances slipped in, but I was generally turning away most friend requests.

However, I was forced to see some of these people in real life. And even though I had decided how and why I personally wanted to use FB, I don't get to personally decide how society does. And, apparently, society has decided that you add all kinds of people to FB. So I was forced to meet with people who thought, "I'm good enough to talk to in real life, but you can't add me as a friend on some software?" There's a social awkwardness that I didn't want to deal with.

I'd say it's because of inertia. The same network effect that sucks you in to FB, because most people around you expect to find you there, raises the barrier for leaving.

However, social trends are largely about perception. Imagine this: a popular musician says publicly, "Facebook is evil and lame, I'm leaving." Lots of teens say, "hey, yeah, me too. I'm a nonconformist. Facebook is lame. I'm leaving." Suddenly leaving Facebook is a cool thing to do, and the network effect is working against them.

Eventually it's like AOL or MySpace: having an active account is definitely uncool.

I think because Facebook does something very smart: they keep it jumpin'. They change things on an almost weekly basis, which everyone complains about, but it keeps them coming back even though the overall experience became sour for them years ago.

They can't keep that up forever though, people will move on. But I disagree with the idea of another site in the same mold (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook) that will move in and conveniently replace it. I think people are starting to realize those things are just a pain in the ass and will move to semi-anonymous networks like Twitter or Reddit for more stress-free entertainment.