As stated multiple times in this thread, a lot of people who developers and creators have friended are professional acquaintances, co-workers, connections or even old friends, who people no longer maintain consistent connections with. Having people friended is a way to keep those connections, even if you do not consistently maintain a relationship with that person in specific. I know for a fact that I have been friends with more than 150 people over the past few years and I can recognize and remember who each person is on my friends list, both on and outside of Roblox. Many developers and players are not maintaining a friendship with everyone who they have âfriendedâ, however they are still acquainted with them and would like to have them as friends on the platform nonetheless.
A feature like this would only benefit users, I do not necessarily see any downsides to implementing this feature on the platform and technological challenges also do not stand as an entirely good reason for why this shouldnât be added, considering those challenges can very well be addressed and fixed (if they do exist), and again, this feature would be beneficial to the vast amounts of developers and users on the platform.
Using âDunbarâs numberâ as an argument for why this shouldnât be added is really not applicable, and would you much rather have an even more limited number of friends than the 200 you can currently have just due to a psychological argument of the majority of people not being able to maintain more than 150 friendships? (which I might add to again, friends on Roblox, especially for developers are not all âfriendshipsâ and a lot are considered acquaintances). Furthermore, looking into the Wikipedia article for Dunbarâs number, directly stated within that article is âhe proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.â, and with that I would like to emphasise the stable relationships part of that quote, as that should automatically invalidate your argument as the majority of Roblox friendships are by definition not going to be considered a âstable relationshipâ if they are professional acquaintances or even people that you may know or have played with before. Another core part to highlight would be âIt has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250, with a commonly used value of 150.â, which means even if the consensus that the reason why an extended friend limit would not be a good idea due to Dunbarâs number, would still allow for an additional 50 friend slots, rather than the 150 that you have quoted from Dunbarâs number, even if that is the âcommonly used valueâ. Additionally, the Wikipedia article states âDunbar has argued that 150 would be the mean group size only for communities with a very high incentive to remain togetherâ, where we can highlight the very high incentive part of the quote, which could be comparable to people you would consider good friends, people who would leave an impact on you if you were to break away friendships with them, whereas professional acquaintances would most likely not leave as much of an impact and you would be a lot less inclined to maintain friendships with them, compared to others.
There is a lot to âDunbarâs numberâ and to the psychology of relationships, overall this is not the place to debate regarding this however I do believe it is important to state that those types of psychological arguments should not be involved in the decision making of this feature request.
TL;DR: Dunbarâs number is not a valid argument against this feature request, this feature request has no foreseeable downside and overall would be a good addition and highly appreciated.
Thank you.