@ Liudvikas:

As much as I joke about being a misanthrope and anti-social reject, I do have a few friends and family members that I like to check up on. Hence I’m on Facebook. It makes me feel like I’m in the loop, even though I haven’t seen them in a while, and haven’t bothered to call them because I hate making phone calls as a rule. :P

Twitter is partially a vanity thing. The activity tab is great – I flip that on every once in a while, and watch people re-tweeting or favoriting my tweets. Feels good man. It tickles the ego. :P

Mostly though I get a kick out of the random conversations I get on there – both with strangers and with people I know. It’s fun.

@ Victoria:

I stopped caring about the FB UI three overhauls ago. I just pop in for a quick glance every once in a while so I don’t really care that much.

I do like Twitter, but I don’t always keep up with my feed. I think I go through phases when I follow bunch of people, until my feed just scrolls to fast and I end up missing most of the interesting tweets. Then I prune out my follow list until it is manageable. Then I decide my feed moves to slow, and it is to stagnant so I follow more people, etc…

I’m registered for everything that’s out there :) I hardly ever use anything. I seem to have developed an inexplicable hatred for FB UI from the very beginning and the stuff they changed since then almost made it worse :) I sporadically use Twitter but I don’t read it much – majority of my news still comes from RSS.

I register to the social network, then remember that I don’t have friends or don’t care about their bullshit.

@ icebrain:

Well, there isn’t much point in using these networks if most of your IRL friends don’t use them either. Perhaps this is also a function of where you live. I noticed that here in NJ Facebook became a huge part of the culture.

Most of people my age have Facebook accounts because it came out when we were in college, and it was a cool thing to do back then. Most people younger than me have it because it is actually difficult to function socially without it. Most people older than me have it because it is the only reliable way to communicate with and keep an eye on their kids.

Also, it seems to be the most popular method for sharing pictures and organizing events.

Nope, I don’t use them. I have Facebook blocked in the hosts file and although I have a Twitter account, it only has one tweet (and a bunch of followers, $deity know why).

The thing is: most of my close family members are seniors who have no idea (nor interest) how to use a computer, so something like FB is more or less useless; email is sufficient for photos and such.

As for tech discussion, I prefer topic-centric networks like Reddit/HN/Slashdot. The fact that most of my IRL friends – including CS students (!), like myself – have no real interest in the topic means I don’t really need a user-centric social network.

So yeah, sorry for the buzzkill ;)