friends list

 Why do people have so many friends on their list?  Some have over 1000!  Why have so many ppl on the list, if they don't talk or communicate?   Help me here.

Is there some kind of contest here to see how many people they can get on their buddy list?  Not being mean or rude, but I know that if someone has 800 on their list, they are NOT talking to 800 off and on, they'd never be playing chess!  

So help me out..why ask for friendr request when there really isn't a desire to be friends, but just to add another number ?  Am I wrong here...

You are wrong. *defriended* LOLOLOL!!

I agree with you. But when for some people, when they see a number, they think the object is to make to make it as large as they can.

The difficulty isn't so much that other other people might have bigger numbers than you but that your actual real friends, the people you consider yourself entirely equal to, have slightly bigger numbers to you.

You see the same kind of phenomenon with salaries. I've found that people are very happy and satisfied with their own job right up until they learn that a friend of theirs earns more than them and suddenly they're no longer satisfied (even if their friend is utterly miserable).

It's utterly bewildering but it's also completely pervasive.

Ummmm... It seems like you don't have a Facebook. The friends list is usually filled with people you don't know for no reason. You just ask somebody you played to be your friend as a friendly gesture I guess, and tada.

But, UsedUsername, I suspect that _IronButterfly_'s awkwardness about this whole business is perhaps with "friend" being too generous an appellation.

There is perhaps a valid reason to include an additional catagory of Special Friends, to accommodate. The ones you are most attached to are placed there. As for the friend list in general, I have never declined a friend request, why would I? There are many reasons why they selected me. Got a laugh out of William T. Riker, First Officer, Starfleet Command. Or Richard Nixon. Or that I have aliens grabbing at my butt. Or, some people see the large friend count, and want to belong. Or, at the time, they are in a particular loney state, and would like to feel an attachment, an acknowledgement of........"they like me." It may be a complete stranger, but still.........people like to be liked. When I get a friend request, I smile, it feels wonderful, and I search out the individual. I like it, I wish more people would friend me...........

I have a few on mine, but I know who all of them are :D

Some friend management facilities would be useful e.g. auto remove any friends who haven't logged into the site during the previous N months.

Good friends are like parachutes, if they're not there the first time you need them, chances are you wont be needing them again!

Oh yes..........exactly!! Either have not logged in, or not played in matches or chatted in awhile. Accounts close so often around here.

Ya know, after reading this, I think I'll think outside of the box some and realize it's about the person needing to belong!  

Thanks all!  :D

It's a small thing. Why bother yourself about it?

RumbleTumble -- You are wise beyond the age of your account. LOL. Just for that cascade of brain-riffing, I'm sending you a friend request, stranger.

If you have many friends then knowing their game style permits  yoy to play chess with them often

That is an excellent reason, Plavin. Thanks for a logical answer, wtihout all the bs with it. Maybe it's not about being "friends", but about contacts to play chess.  Any friendship that is obtained from that, is a good thing. 

Social psychologists have found that the number of virtual 'friends' is correlated with the size of someone's real-life social circle. I've never been sure of what to make of that. I can think of a few:

1. SCHOOL AGE: younger people have been on social media while at school and therefore friend everyone in their school while older people friend a few people from work and their more settled social life.
2. INSECURITY: people who define their own social value in terms of how popular they are look at a friend count and immediately decide that the object is to make this number as large as possible as quickly as possible.
3. TOLERANCE: people who are tolerant of a large variety of people rarely burn bridges in real-life and similarly rarely defriend online contacts and therefore their friends total steadily increases in both domains.
4. etc, etc.

In short,... I don't know. :-)

This whole question reminds me of yet another study regarding women who put a lot of effort into their appearance, are quite shallow and outwardly seem very happy. Most other women tend to say something like "they seem happy but they're not really happy". That's quite testable and it was found that shallowness is not significantly correlated with happiness (although there was a slight anti-correlation).

If I was a betting man, and given two lists of 500 people each where the first group have 6000 friends and the second have 60, then the stats would predict that the first group, on average, would have bigger real-world social circles and, since that is correlated with happiness, that they are also probably happier on average.

But when dealing with individual cases then things are a bit more variable and you'd need other information before you could start saying much with any useful degree of confidence.

RumbleTumble -- I call foul on your last post. That doesn't seem like a discussion either you or Sandy should be airing in public. Can I respectfully recommend you both delete or edit out the personal content. I like this topic and wouldn't like to unsubscribe from it if it's going to degrade into a personal to-and-fro which has nothing to do with me. Please let's not let that happen here. :-|

I've been a member since 09 and I have 8 friends on my list..... I play chess with them all the time.....some people like to have a huge list of friends.....others dont.....everyone is different :)

True friends are absolutely priceless.  As a manager I found it was best to criticize employees in private while providing them with constructive criticism; this is a good policy among friends as well... in my humble opinion.

Why worry about how many friends someone else has?