In the real world, we pick our friends based upon certain traits and conditions.  We want people we can like who have shared interests and who have a certain proximity to us.  The Internet has changed the proximity aspect of friendship, but we still need to be able to interact with our friends in some way to truly be friends.

In social media, “friendship” is more of a way to get votes for your submissions than to interact with others.  There are certainly those who make real friends through social media.  Some of the people I interact with on a daily basis were people I met on social media sites.  Still, the bottom line in social media friendship is “vote for my submissions and I’ll vote for yours.”

There is something skewed about this concept, but we’ll ignore it for this article.  Instead, we’ll accept the fact that most social media friends aren’t really friends and focus on how to be a good one, as well as finding other good ones. [Read more...]