"So should I un-friend that girl I met at a party five years ago but haven’t spoken to since? Oh wait, you make that nearly impossible. Plus, how then will I know that she needs my help to kill a rival Mafia?!"
If you no longer care about someone's updates or anything that's going on in their life, you can remove them as a friend. I know tons of people who have removed people from their friends lists. Or if someone plays too many games and you dont like seeing that update on your feed, mute those types of posts or posts from that user.
It's actually quite difficult to remove a friend. You have to go to their individual page, scroll down, look at a text link on the bottom left of the page, click "Yes" in the confirmation box.
I wish I could just navigate through my friends list and remove friends right from there just like how I can add them to groups or lists or anything I want.
Actually, you can just hover their name anywhere on the site (including your friends list), hover the “Friends” button and click “Unfriend”. It hardly gets easier than that.
A: Anything you have to do by hand up to 400+ times is not particularly easy. It's an hour's mind-numbing work.
B: It's only easy if there's no cognitive load to unfriending someone. If you have to call them up in your mind, decide if they're still a friend... that's thought, and the emotions involved can be literally overwhelming depending on your personality.
C: Do the people you unfriend get alerted in any way? Take everything I alluded to in point B and raise it to the third power, because now every click is also a social signal...
A: True, but “mind-numbing” does not mean “quite difficult”. Also, if you have 400+ Facebook friends you wish you hadn’t I think it’s your fault, not Facebook’s. I don’t expect any service to provide marginal functionality like that. You do that once and from then on you think more carefully before accepting someone’s request.
If you no longer care about someone's updates or anything that's going on in their life, you can remove them as a friend. I know tons of people who have removed people from their friends lists. Or if someone plays too many games and you dont like seeing that update on your feed, mute those types of posts or posts from that user.