Board Game Arena

chrisa wrote:This may be "logical" (whatever this means...) for a social network, but as far as I know, BGA is not a social network. Not every website has to behave as a social network. Not everybody likes social networks.

AMEN, AMEN, and AMEN!!! You are my new favorite friend. (Pardoning the sort of pun.)

Moony, you are just wrong. It's a social site, yes, but it's not a "social networking" site. That doesn't mean the same thing. Social networking is a fairly specific thing, and every site that is "social" is not social networking, and should NOT be turned into social networking. I absolutely abhor social networking, and I see a very distinct difference between the two.

I dislike the idea of having to "accept" the friending, therefore making everyone reciprocal friends. Why should I not be able to follow someone without them having to return the "favor"? If I notice someone has friended me, I'll probably add them too, but I don't want to have to, nor force them to have my acceptance before adding me.

And I seriously dislike the idea of everyone always being notified of who is friending who. If I add another new friend, why do all my other friends need to know about it? Why is it even their business? I might want them to know, but it's not up to someone else to make sure they know. They can look at my profile. In fact, this is one of the very things I hate about social networking, and especially places like Twitter, is this concept that everyone else needs to know everything I'm doing. No, they do not. So to someone like Moony I would have to ask, why should you get to decide this for me? Don't try to force FB and Twitter on me. Please just accept that some of us are not the same as you.

I also dislike that "friend" has turned into a verb....

I don't necessarily see any reason to notify someone when they've been friended. And like Chrisa said earlier, it's not really because it's some big secret, but simply because it should be up to me what I want to let people know. Off the top of my head, I can't even think of any places that inform me of this (yeah, I know they exist - just can't think of any right now), and there's even one place where you can't even see it in someone's profile. In other words, for non-social networking sites, there is nothing unusual about this.

Liallan wrote: I dislike the idea of having to "accept" the friending, therefore making everyone reciprocal friends. Why should I not be able to follow someone without them having to return the "favor"? If I notice someone has friended me, I'll probably add them too, but I don't want to have to, nor force them to have my acceptance before adding me.

I should note that this place isn't like a message system where you build a contact list, where you should have the right to control whether you end up on someone's contact list or not. That can actually turn into an abusive situation, or even a security issue, hence you can usually make a setting to receive nothing from anyone who isn't on your contact list. But I don't see making someone a friend here as the same type of thing.