social media

At what point did it become frowned upon to add "randoms"? When did social media become a tool to stay in touch with existing friends rather than to make new ones?

I remember the fun in adding someone I didn't know on ICQ, in fact I'm pretty sure thats all people used to do. You could search for people via age and interest and then you can send them a msg. I used to search for people aged from 8-16 (even though I think you needed to be at least 16 to have a ICQ account) and chat about Pokemon all day.

It would be such an occasion when you ended up speaking to someone in the same city.
I distinctively remember once when I gave someone my phone number (horrible decision in retrospect) as a kid and I talked about Pokemon on the phone with a stranger.

Now I've realized that people from non-english speaking countries tend to use facebook to make friends rather than adding existing friends.

I wonder why that is? When did adding randoms become creepy in our social norms, because at one point it wasn't. I remember making homepages on geocities with photos for the world to see, from that to writing on xanga and then eventually social networks as we now know it.

Will other cultures go through similar usage patterns? Or is there something that sets our behavioral evolutions apart?

Confucian philosophy which heavily dominates Asia insists that one does not exist to you unless formerly introduced, whilst Australians like to think we are friendly and could make friends everywhere.

Why is this reversed when it comes to the internet? (As far as I know)