I occasionally receive friend requests on CT, sometimes from people I know or at least know from here, and sometimes from total strangers. I’ve never sent out a friend request - what’s the motivation? You can float tasting notes to the top by being a Fan. Is it just in the hope that you have your privacy settings such that they allow Friends to view your cellar? I don’t - my cellar is not visible to anyone - so I sit on the fence about accepting these requests. I don’t think it has any impact on me or on them, unless there’s a function I’m missing, but it also gives them nothing, as far as I can tell.
How about others? Do send/accept friend requests and why? I’m vaguely curious about whether others keep their cellars private or public as well.
I keep my cellar private by default but I have a few close wine friends where I have given them read access. That is generally so that we can coordinate offlines or see each other’s cellars to jointly decide what to drink together. I’ve found that to be a valuable and fun capability, but only with people I know in the real world.
Not something I aim to do, but occasionally I see a friend request from someone here, or on Auswine forum, and it’s natural to accept it, and I may even reciprocate a follow.
I could see how one might see TNs that are helpful / informative (or simply credible) and want to curate a grouping of such tasters, if that brings their TNs to the top of a wine’s list of TNs. I’ll read TNs from strangers for sure, but sometimes the way they are written and some of their opinions, make me instantly discount it as of any use whatsoever. Perhaps then curating such a group of friends helps weed out or sort out the less credible TNs?
After checking, I have 1 friend on CT, my uncle with whom I share a physical cellar with in Montreal. I’ve never found any use for CT friends either. But now that I’ve checked, I do feel like a loser seeing this every time I log on to CT:
I wondered the same phenomenon for some time as well.
I guess some people just go to other users’ profiles and click both on “Add a friend” and “Become a fan” because they don’t understand the difference. Or they might just click on the former, because they don’t know how the things work and think of it as how the latter actually works.
IMO it made more sense in the legacy CT, where the button said “Add as a cellar buddy” or something along those lines. It tells the used much more what the feature means, instead of “friend”.
For the most part, I don’t add “friends” in CT, unless they’re people I arrange tastings with and we need access to each others’ cellars. I never accept friend requests from random users.
As the organizer of my local group, I would love it if I could see their cellars. It would make it so much easier to organize a dinner. But most of them don’t even use CT. I can’t think of another reason.
Of course they don’t know, thus my comments about hope and disappointment!
I’m not so dense as to have missed the possible uses of granting cellar access. I’ve briefly opened mine to friends when I want to grant temporary access to a certain person for planning, the only one who knows it’s temporarily opened.
Was just wondering if there’s any reason or motivation beyond wanting / granting a view into the cellar.
Not a practical reason, but if someone has commented on my TNs (even if disagreeing/especially if disagreeing) I often feel like acknowledging that by sending a friend request.
I don’t use the CT cellar functions btw, mostly because my own cellar management mentality is so…idiosyncratic…that more rational systems start to confuse me.
I’ve requested to be friends with people whose tasting notes I’ve agreed with. Curious what they buy that I may need to look in to. Not sure thats any different than following a critic from a publicaiton.
