On Facebook this morning, I see a lady named “Donna” accepted my friend request.
The only problem is, I have no idea who Donna is. I know I didn’t intentionally request a friendship with her. So I assume I must have accidentally hit the request button with out realizing it (Although, that seems rather dubious too. Not sure how I could have missed something like that).
Anyway, I’m just confused why the heck this lady accepted my friend request. I looked at her profile. From the looks of it, she has an active social life. So it’s not like she’s a lonely old lady desperate for friendship.
I won’t accept requests from anyone I don’t know - and by know, I include Dopers with whom I interact, even if we haven’t met for reals. I’ve set my account for Friends Only - not that I have great secrets to hide, but I prefer that I’m not sharing things with the whole world.
On rare occasions, I’ll change a single post to “Everyone” but mostly not.
As for Donna - maybe she defines her self-worth by how many “friends” she has?
My only FB friends are close family and friends that I see on a regular basis. I have about 24 now. I get friend requests quite regularly and dismiss them all. I really don’t care what the friend of a friend of a friend is doing. Also, a sister in law and a grand daughter do a great job of filling my page with all the cute animal crap I need, I don’t need anymore.
At best, she somehow knows you through some social network or bumped into your somewhere along the line. At worst, she’s just a straight up scammer*. From the sounds of it, she’s just a social butterfly trying to gather up lots of friends. But in any case, no. I’ll accept friend requests from people I don’t know well, but if I don’t know them, then no.
*I know of one case where I got a friend request from someone that I didn’t know but he went to my high school, lot of mutual friends so I accepted him. After a few days someone asked (on facebook) who it was and a bunch of us realized that we all accepted him for the same reason I did. We all just thought everyone else knew him. I checked all my year books and didn’t see his name. The person listed as his wife worked at the same place as an IRL friend of mine so I asked my friend to ask her. Turns out her husband has no such FB page. In the end, it was just a fake page, most likely set up to infiltrate our high school’s social network and, if I had to guess, spy on someone who’s page is private.
ETA, I see you sent her the request by mistake. If I were you I’d just unfriend her.
Some of my best “friends” on Facebook are people I’ve never met face to face. I would not accept a scammer, but every so often circumstances occur and I end up with a friend.
Pretty much never, although I’ve accepted a few requests from people whose names I couldn’t place at all but whose education information and contacts suggest that we were, in fact, classmates at one time. (Come to think of it, though, that would be a really easy way for someone to infiltrate a social network; pick a random [but real] high school and year of graduation, search for people who really did attend that school around that time, and send friend requests to all of them.)
Extremely rarely, if someone is a member of a group I associate with, and they are friends with other members of that group, I accept friend requests from them. I frequently accept friend requests from people I barely know. I rarely don’t accept friend requests from people I know well, since I try to keep work and non-work separate.
I would guess “Donna” is some sort of scammer, or else there was a Facebook glitch. I would probably unfriend her.
I accept requests from people I know personally, and will sometimes accept ones from people who I haven’t met but am aware of professionally. Currently I have about 90 friend requests that I haven’t accepted. I have too many things coming in on my Facebook page as it is to have it cluttered up by posts by people I have no knowledge of.
As I am an ex-Jehovah’s Witness, I used to accept requests from other exJWs, even if I didn’t know them. I’ve given that up, because it led to a situation where well over half of my FB friend list was made up of people that I had no idea as to who they were (except that they were exJWs). I purged the list down to people that I knew in person or had had some amount of online interaction with. The standard is the same now when I get requests. Being an exJW or a friend of a friend doesn’t get you anywhere; I have to know who you are and have either met you in person or had significant online interaction with you.
No. I recently purged about 60% of all my Facebook friends and deleted just about every post I made back in the day. I went from about 250 “friends” down to less than 100. I also will only accept requests from actual close friends in the future. I felt like the Executioner when I purged all those losers!
Not only won’t I accept requests from people I don’t know, I also don’t always accept from people I do know. Two dozen or so friends is enough. I joined because my grandchildren often posted. Now, however, they mostly use something else and I am really not interested in joining whatever that is. Already FB is so full of ads, it is painful.
I have turned down 100% of the strangers who have tried to friend me and 80% of the people I am friends with in real life. Facebook is only something I use for a couple specific meetings/things like Santarchy and I have no desire being active or investing time in it. Having a very small close number of Facebook-Friends just works better for me.
I sometimes accept requests from “single serving friends”, IOW, people I meet out and about socially and hit it off with, but as a practical matter, it’s unlikely we will ever hang out again. Often I defriend them within a year if they are not otherwise connected to my actual social network.
Generally, I use social media to enhance my actual social network. That is to say, real-world invitations to events. There is little value for me to add random strangers.
LinkedIn I’m a bit more flexible if there is a valid business case for me to accept your request.
I wouldn’t assume Donna is a scammer- I know I’ve managed to accidentally send friend requests before, while commenting on a friend’s post. Given the way Facebook works, odds are you share at least one friend in common, and she may be thinking you’re someone she’s met via that friend. No big deal.
I fairly regularly get requests from people I don’t know, but have multiple friends in common with. They’re generally part of the same large society/subculture as me, and half the time it turns out I have actually met them at some event or other, or I sometimes meet them afterwards. I don’t post anything really personal on Facebook, so if I decide that actually, no, I don’t want to be in contact with this person I delete 'em, but sometimes the people who friend everyone are good contacts within the society, and are great sources of info and news, even if I never meet them in person.
I didn’t accept the stupidly hot blonde Russian girl who I received a request from last week though
Three years ago my sister unfriended me, my brother, and my brother’s son over some humorous post that offended her. I was cool with her action, as her posts are largely glurge, which I hate.
Six months ago she sent friend requests to us. I’ve ignored mine.
I won’t accept/send a friend request unless I already know you in some manner. I belong to a few private groups, and have friended people from them and vice versa. Most of my FB friends originated online, LOL. The RL people on my list are on a separate filter. They don’t get any details of anything
