Having Friends on RecruitingBlogs.com

If you don't like wrestling, don't watch the movie.

As a member of RecruitingBlogs.com, I can send out emails to a few hundred of my friends here on the network. In reality that is a lot of friends. I don’t look at RecruitingBlogs.com the way I look at LinkedIn where there exists some fascination with big numbers. I tried to send an email to my friends here on RecruitingBlogs.com before the holidays and it took me forever to get it done and it was a disaster because I have too many friends here on the network and not enough of the right ones. I know that everyone’s “right ones” are different.

As the guy who has admin rights here at RecruitingBlogs.com I know that members want to be friends with you. It’s not a bad thing but I really suggest before you request to be friends with someone or accept someone’s friendship, really take a look at their profile. You can tell a lot if you look at a few things. You can see how many friends they have. You can see how many conversations they have started or participated in. You can see how many blog posts they have done. You can form a good picture of what it is they do here and then, you can look at what it is they say they do.

As a member of RecruitingBlogs.com, I have too many friends on the network there is no point in me adding new friends anymore but the problem is lately I see so many amazing new posts and ideas and discussions that take place between people who I am not connected with and the stuff I read from them makes me want to be connected with them. I can’t though because it will just take more time. The solution I think for me as a member, and I’m going to start tomorrow, is that I am going to start cutting connections and I want to bring it down to 300. I have 913 friends so it may take a while but I am going to start tomorrow. The thing about the 300 number is that it will be easier to see how I can cut another 100. I think 200 is the right number. I can then start growing it to 500 and I think I will stop there. It's a lot, I know.

As the guy who has admin rights here at RecruitingBlogs.com I have banned over 60 people. It’s no big deal anymore. I don’t even feel bad about it anymore. Most times I don’t even give a warning. The most interesting thing about it for me is that in 99% of the time, I never get an email from them asking why and in 99% of the time, I am never on their friends list. Today I banned 3 people from the network and one from the chat. Two of them were quite attractive and the third one happened to be the fourth time I have had to cut off his access. The attractive ladies had about 1800 friends between them. I felt rejected today as a male because my face is everywhere on the site yet I was not friends with these ladies, they never asked to be my friend.

I think RecruitingBlogs.com is an amazing community with amazing people who contribute a ton of wonderful stuff. As long as I can keep the true toxic stuff out by monitoring it for certain behavior and exercising my administrator’s ability, I will. I hope you don’t mind and I hope you know I don't ban people for having too many friends. In the above cases, it was a lot more than that.

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on January 9, 2009 at 11:37am

@Jason davis Please JD, this has gone far beyond what you want now. You've opened the floodgates. Now you've only got two choices: lead the reactionaries or let the open sourcing of the rules of your network's structure begin.

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Permalink Reply by Slouch on January 9, 2009 at 11:39am

It's all good.

Recruiting Animal said:

@Jason davis Please JD, this has gone far beyond what you want now. You've opened the floodgates. Now you've only got two choices: lead the reactionaries or let the open sourcing of the rules of your network's structure begin.

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Permalink Reply by Dennis Smith on January 9, 2009 at 12:21pm

@everyone....nice comments. I have to say that i love the forward thinking @Animal, whose idea of defriending, falls in line with Godin's thoughts re. socal networks and friends. I can derive a lot of value on this site without being connected to every person on this site. In fact, to be honest, since joining this community, my valueometer has not increased in accordance with the number of 'friends' I have in the community.

Not sure that last sentence made sense. I benefit (learn) by being in the community, and by actively participating in the community - not by being connected to everyone in the community.

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Permalink Reply by Salvatore Petrara, CPC on January 9, 2009 at 3:18pm

Hi Slouch;
Well I hope you do not cut me...
What activity do you look for that prompts one to be cut?
I am active in this environment and want to continue being active...
Thanks

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Permalink Reply by Salvatore Petrara, CPC on January 9, 2009 at 3:23pm

Hi Jason;
Well I love this site and would hate being cut.
I am curious though what activity prompts one to be cut?
I surely will make a point of it...
I believe this site has over 15,000 members, no doubt this number will grow large and fast, real fast.
RBC wall of shame sounds good like Steve said...
Go Giants!

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Permalink Reply by John G. Self on January 9, 2009 at 4:26pm

I could not agree with you more. I tend to accept connections from people who have something interesting to say --either about my blogs or other discusssions -- those from home market, DFW (Texas) and with those from whom I can learn.

I won't be offended if you cut me from your list! I do appreciate your work on this site.

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Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on January 9, 2009 at 4:31pm

Simon if you want to market something on Twitter -- and it is being used as a marketing tool -- you need to have as many followers as possible and following someone is the primary means of introducing yourself to others.

As for keeping up, not every twit is going to be interesting. For instance, some is personal chit chat that you want to skip. So if you want twitter to provide a snack drawer you can dip into at any time for real time fun you have to follow more than you can keep up with if you intend to read each and every one.

Re ning. The friends I make on other networks don't count on RBC unless they are members here too. Are you saying that friend limits on RBC would not work because of friends from other networks would fill my friend quota before I could make new friends on RBC?

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Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on January 9, 2009 at 4:33pm

JD. don't say "it's all good". That's moronic. Even an airhead hippie doesn't believe that.

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Permalink Reply by Faisal Javed on January 9, 2009 at 4:37pm

I agree with you on this part, i had observed it several times on different networking websites...

Rayanne said:

I have started this process on my myspace and facebook. It is tedious and a thoughtful process... I found out through the grapevine that one of my "friends" was using some eloquent tactics to dig up some dirt on me..., what? they already read my personal thoughts and know my favorite music and books?
Time to clean out the web - there are too many flies!
I guess we should remember the difference between connection and friend...

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Permalink Reply by Faisal Javed on January 9, 2009 at 4:46pm

Its very true. You should post the names of banned members so that we all can update ourselves. If possible than kindly add some lines about rbc in invitation which we are sending to our friends and colleagues for joining this website, they should be aware of those practices which can restrict them from using rbc.

We all know that spamming and porn is getting everywhere so there should be something which can limit a person from sending 100 messages if you notice that s/he is doing it regularly.

Sharing a job and helping a candidate is nice but bombarding someones account with nonsense is pathetic.

Regards,
Faisal

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Permalink Reply by Martin H.Snyder on January 9, 2009 at 4:48pm

I have the same problem on facebook. The answer is a technical one; just like in real life, we have Friends, and we have Acquaintances, which are not the same things, even though some of the things we do together are the same.

Somone needs to figure out how to parse content to your online Friends (which should somewhat reflect meatworld) and your online acquaintances (the more the better if you can stay connected to them).

Then you can figure out which group(s) are appropriate for which activities- like holiday greetings or personal news.....

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Permalink Reply by Recruiting Animal on January 9, 2009 at 5:14pm

Faisal, I haven't seen anyone sending me porn yet on RBC. But as long as it isn't an advertisement for penis extensions that's not something I'd necessarily ban or cut from my friend list.