How do you accept all friend requests?

Are people less likely to accept Facebook friend requests than they were 5 years ago?

• 5 years ago, almost everyone accepted my friend requests. Now not as many do. I don't send them to random people - I send them to people I know, but who I may have not talked to in a couple of years. Still, even these people were willing to accept 5 years ago

• Answer:

  Facebook has gotten uptight.  They have a hidden limit on how many friends you can request now whereas 5 years ago they encouraged people to add many friends.  They will use the excuse of protecting spam, but I believe the real reason is to save bandwidth (if someone has 2000 friends instead of 300 friends their newsfeed has so much more on it and it takes the servers longer to generate, which also is why there is a 5000 limit).  Also, Facebook used to be geared towards the colleges (and I believe it was better back then, how many interesting status postings do you see from 40+ year olds).  During this time, you saw "Top Friends" rankings, games, events, quizzes, and pokes.  Many people talked to random people and it sometimes led to hangouts.  Now, it's more family and they have removed a lot of the fun stuff that may deter the older crowd.  Also, because of the integration of the family on facebook, people are much more conservative about what they are posting.  Before, people would post anything about girls/guys they liked, their crazy parties, more provocative pictures, etc. and now they are afraid an uncle or aunt or even parent who's watching might frown upon them at the next family gathering.  Add to the fac that now some people are facebook friends with their co-workers and are afraid it could affect their image.  Also, girls are quicker to delete guys now who write on their wall who they haven't talked to in a long time or are random because they don't want family questioning them at Thanksgiving about "the guy who just wrote on their wall last week."  Overall, facebook has hit a brick wall because everyone is cautious about what they do and they really took the social out of social networking.