Slashdot Mirror
Who Unfriended You, and Why
Barence writes "Given that social-networking sites like to put across a happy-clappy image of friendship and joy, it's not surprising that they're less keen to tell you when someone doesn't want to be as friendly with you any more. PC Pro reveals how to find out who really hates you on social networks. It's possible to track who's quietly dropped you from their Facebook friends list, for example, by installing Firefox's Greasemonkey add-in and running a special script. Meanwhile, there are sites that will reveal the exact tweet that turned people off your Twitter account."
I'm pretty sure I don't really give a crap who drops me. I go through my list and clean house about once every couple months. As a racing cyclist I get friend invites all the time from people I barely know. I keep them around for a while and if they don't participate or I find I really don't like them in person I add them to the drop list for next housecleaning time. People worry about what other people think about them WAY too much. I just don't give a fuck.
.. doesn't 'friend' you on Facebook in the first place.
This might be slightly useful if it could actually get the data out of Facebook itself. Instead it makes a copy of your friend list when you install it, then rechecks your friends in the future to see if any have disappeared.
There is a habit lots of people on Facebook have where they have a Gotta' Catch em All - Pokemon sorta mentality where they HAVE to have the largest number of friends possible. When I visit my facebook page I just add everyone who asks just because I dont care. I have close to 900 'friends' and the majority of them are people I will never associate with or have no association with they just added me through another friend. I dont really care who deletes me or adds me.. and I think its a sad commentary on somone who goes out of their way to search people who have removed them from their lists. Facebook is just getting ridiculous anyway I cant wait for it to burn out just like My Space.
When you dislike the human race as much as I do, Karma:Bad is inevitable lol.
Details about who doens't want to friend you and why should remain private. Then again that's true for most of the stuff posted on facebook but that's another story.
...but apparently there's something about Facebook I can care even less about.
Because I might have offended some people whom I have never spoken to in 20 years, never bothered to look up and even then hardly knew and I have nothing in common with.Also they did not bother in the least to find me, except click on a button on facebook.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I wonder if my wife has used this. 'Cuz I never really told her why.
who modded your Slashdot post!
I don't like you any more. In fact, for the last 30 years, I found you kind of intolerable.
Signed,
The Egyptian People
I don't have a tremendous amount of FB friends. ~100. But whenever someone unfriends me, I can NEVER, EVER tell who it was.
I figure well, they obviously didn't have that much impact on my life, so they probably won't be missed. But I've resorted to cut-n-pasting my list of friends over to a text file, so that I can figure out who it was when curiosity gets the better of me.
It seems a more economical solution to me than having a greasemonkey script constantly running in the background.
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
And ah wouldn't put above any of ye to dress up and pretend to be a sociologist on the weekends! "Social Nettwerks"!? Persanahlly ah'v spent the last 45 years on the top of a stick in an air-filled cave on the bottom of a lake in the arse-end of nowhere! Young on's nowaydays like to brag about bei'n "emotionally attached" to their anime "wives" - pishposh. You try 'an manage the gossip and scandals inher'nt to an anime *harem*! It's not the milk-an-honey existence they make it out 'ta be lemmetellya! The last time I saw a live 'uman face was when a cave diver popped up in mah dwelli'n a few years ago - the bastard tried tah initiate a "conversachun", but ah resolutely gripped hold of mah "Frightenin' Axe" (which ah had strategically kept located safely in mah beard for purpouses and situations such as these) and bellowed out thae most feral WAAAAAAGH! mah poor manhandled lungs could manage! He must'vbeen pretty surprised, 'cause he just sort of made a surprisin'ly smooth backwards dive back intae the entry pool and I guess just continued tae swim outta there, bein' the last I saw of him.
But if an honest man tells people suchlike stories on the Internet these days, they won't believe him!
Emotions! In your brain!
...only for two reasons.
1) Their statuses were annoying. They were either constantly emo, pathetic "i have to work FML", or just retarded. I de-friended an aunt who always left stupid crazy statuses in all-caps, "OMG THEY WANT TO BAN RELIGION EVERYONE SIGN THIS NOW." type of stuff. Oh, she also played farmville constantly and clogged up my homescreen with stupid app messages.
2) I completely forgot who they were. Acquaintances from high school or people I met at one party one time who I could no longer even pick you out of a lineup. If I see a status from you on my homepage and I have no idea who you are, out you go.
I don't even understand the need to unfriend, I just remove them from my news feed. That way they can see my stuff, driving traffic to my blog. I use to delete people but now I don't.
Jonathanjk.com
If I can't tell I was unfriended on my own odds are I don't care enough about that person anyway.
They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it's not one half so bad as a lot of ignorance. - Terry Pratchett
Basically some people just haven't bothered to learn Facebook properly. As you point out it's just a few clicks in your main newsfeed. I really question the world many Slashdotters appear to live in...
I'm missing the connection you suggest between using social networking sites and caring what other people think. I fought Facebook for years because it's just another flash in the pan fad, but while my son was at army basic training he mentioned that his unit had a Facebook page. So I signed up just to be able to read whatever news they posted.
Turns out friends I lost track of years ago are also there, and friends I'd like to keep up with but don't seem to use email much. So after my son came home I kept up with Facebook. Not because I give a flying Microsoft what people think, but because it's nice to know how my friends are doing -- I would not have otherwise known that a former colleague has been diagnosed with breast cancer, or the daughter of a family friend is having a baby. I block all the announcements of who is playing what games, I roll my eyes whenever one of them succumbs to the "If you care about SOME_CAUSE you will post this as your status" meme, and once in a while I can follow up with some concern -- "How did that operation turn out?" "Did you pass neurobiology?" "Did you get any cool pictures of that horrible growth before they removed it?"
Another thing Facebook revealed was that I'm far more social than I realized. I vowed from the start that I would never accept random friend requests; I only added as friends people I personally know, either in a current environment or a close relationship to in the past. That obnoxious kid whom I only remember because we sat in the same math class? Nope. My best friend's daughter whom I have never met? Nope. The girl who got stuck with me in a special reading group in the first grade because we were both ahead of the rest of the class? Boy, was I glad to find her! So anyway, even with my strict limits on who gets added as a friend, I have about 200. Every single one of them I can tell you about their family or work, I can picture their faces in my memory, I can remember why they are important to me.
As a typical antisocial nerd, I'm astounded. I honestly thought I couldn't count more than five friends across 47.78 years of life.
So yeah, Facebook has the potential to be a mind-numbing exercise in idiocy... but if you use it carefully, it's a great means of keeping up with friends when there isn't really a practical way to call up all 200 of them and ask how they're doing.
I removed my facebook profile last week. And as I expected, no one cared or have reacted and my life is the same as always. It is painfylly clear to me now, how much a waste of time it was.
It's actually easier to remove someone from the newsfeed than it is to unfriend them. Never mind ignoring the fact that people you're cutting off your own oxygen by unfriending people from seeing content you create. Make them believe they are your friend or make them delete you. My methods saves me a ton of hassle.
Jonathanjk.com
That depends a lot on your use of facebook.
My account has only people I want seeing my personal stuff. I am fully aware that the "security" of facebook privacy etc is bunk but it does give me a place to have day-to-day drivel without having to deal with the trolling asshats on most blogging sites.
I make my money building control systems for oil rigs and find it challenging and interesting. I have no need to drive traffic to my blog :p
hypocrisy n. pl -sies
1. the practice of professing standards, beliefs, etc, contrary to one's real character or actual behaviour, esp he pretence of virtue and piety (-source: World English Dictionary)
Alice bitches about the evil of Product X but makes such choices in her life so as to use more Product X than all of her friends and neighbors.
Bob points out that Person A does both, but he doesn't pretend to care one way or the other about Product X.
Alice is a hypocrite. Bob is not. Bob might be irresponsibly using Product X himself, or he might be a pompous asshole who likes to point out others' mistakes, but unless Bob at the same time explicitly points out or at least strongly implies that he does not share those self-same faults, Bob is not practicing hypocrisy.
MSIE: The world's most standards-complaint web browser.
It's not that we don't like you, we're just fickle.
It's easy to find everyone who defriended you. Of course, I have no idea who any of those people are, let alone why they want to hide my posts.
Anyone else think facebook would be a lot more interesting with disliking, foes, and freaks?
This space intentionally left blank.
For example, a spouse in the middle of a divorce may "friend" the lover of the other spouse in order to collect information helpful in the divorce proceedings.
The issue of who wants to friend you and why is not addressed by this application. What this application does is to provide information that is publicly available. That information consists of two elements: changes to your friends list and whether a friend request is still outstanding. Both of these pieces of information are available to the observant face book user. The app just makes it easier to notice.
Correlating these pieces of information to an explanation of why they happened isn't something the app actually does. One can conjecture that a post of "politican X is worse than Hitler" followed by friend Y defriending you means that Y likes politician X. But that is conjecture. The timing could have been coincidental.
Moreover, it could be that someone does want to friend you but thinks that for whatever reason it might not be expedient. After all, a relationship on Facebook is really only a name on an access control list. It doesn't really indicate whether one has a friendly relationship in real life. As an example, a professor may be good friends with undergraduate students but may feel that being "friends" on Facebook is inappropriate until such time as those students graduate.
So I don't see an "evil" here. Rather, I just see one more tool that can be used correctly or incorrectly, appropriately or inappropriately, for good or for evil.
Friends are people with whom you have some level of trust and an ongoing relationship. They are the sort of people who will tell you if you've done something that they consider objectionable rather then just deleting you from a list or posting dirt about you online. If you think that someone is a friend just because they include you on a list, you need to do some serious work on developing social skills.
That said, friends come and go. I've had friends in the past that, due to distance, changes in social circles, or life goals, , I haven't kept up with. I never had to go through a process to 'de-friend' them on a list. I just don't deal with them anymore. At some point, I might delete them from my phone/e-mail contacts list (usually when its getting full). That's not a signal that they (or I) did anything wrong, so the idea that they'd receive a message is somewhat disturbing.
Have gnu, will travel.
Chick I went to high school with, now Mormon. She had some status update about Jesus, referencing him as a man I believe. I just showed her some of my history of world religions chops (recent class I had) and compared and contrasted different religions views on hey sues, and whether he was viewed as a man or a god. . Made it a little humorous. BAM, unfriended. turns out Mormons don't have a sense of humor. .
Just take the wrong side of the emacs/vi debate and watch what happens.
Have gnu, will travel.
The result. Whatever dude!
First don't friend everyone that comes along just because they said hi at a bar or wherever or you knew they from way back. People change! So friend people who are only your friends. If you have 1000 friends, they are not your friends, they are fans or acquaintances. Second, setup groups of people and put friends in a friend group, and acquaintances in a different group and family in another group. Then when you post stuff you can determine who sees what on facebook. You can also setup groups like close friends, distant friends, old friends, acquaintances, family, distant family, relatives that I never met but my mom says they know me, predators, and so on.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Man,most the high rated posts are post on how cool we are because we don't care.
Yet everyone one of them people who "dont' care" have a facebook account. So you must care some, to have the account, right?
Ha, just messing with ya. I have an account, and I don't care about it either.
Friend me, unfriend me. foe me, like me. poke me, sex me up. It's all cool. I don't care about you, nor will I. Mainly if we sex it up. thanks!
Be seeing you...
TECO is the only true editor!!!
un-ALTERED reproduction and dissimination of this IMPORTANT information is ENCOURAGED
Using this I saw a couple of family members that have yet to accept my friend invite. Guess I can remove them from my Christmas card list.
(actually, I know they're not computer savvy, I'm guessing they haven't logged back in for a while)
n.ervo.us is an app on Facebook that actually tells who deleted/blocked you or if they deleted their account and this actually works.
The assumption that I've un-friended someone because I hate them is flat out wrong. To me, facebook is a tool to keep up on real life friends. I don't pretend to keep up or care what the other 50+ people that qualify as weak acquaintances are doing, I just don't have the cognitive overhead for it. Additionally, I prefer to avoid divulging who I am to weak acquaintances that walk the line of total strangers -it's an issue of trust, it has nothing to do with hate, and it is a function of time. Removal is forced because I don't want to maintain what is a dishonest relationship with someone.
Make it a public event. Post a detailed explanation for why this person no longer deserves to share in your wonderful Facebook existence. If you dare.
As an added benefit, this will probably cause some folks to unfriend you.
I don't even understand the need to unfriend, I just remove them from my news feed. That way they can see my stuff, driving traffic to my blog. I use to delete people but now I don't.
I do not unfriend, add or remove people on Facebook, Twitter or any other social networking site as I refuse to use them. These social network sites are just like IRC for the general public with GUI on steriods. Considering I have been an IRC addict, I have empathy with people stuck on these treadmills.
What I am more concerned about is; how this is affecting people mentally and real social interactivity. In 20 years time, kids will be retards with no practical life skills if we carry on this way. Just as smoking cigarettes used to be cool and socially acceptable, times change.
Get a life, get outdoors!
I totally agree dude. But we will have to adapt social networks and the internet just as we did with smoking. Give it time and don't expect a quick fix, we couldn't with smoking.
Jonathanjk.com