That’s where the ‘unfollow’ button comes in handy. I always advocate for people to use that rather than unfriending someone, especially when you know them in real life. You’re still friends, you can still go to their page and see their updates* but all those updates won’t show up in your feed.
*Side note, if you unfollow an actual friend, check their page from time to time. I have a few IRL friends that I don’t follow, so it’s always a little embarrassing when I bump into them and find out they have more kids than they did last time I saw them and I had no idea. Hopefully, ‘um, I don’t go on FB all that often’ is convincing enough.
I unfollowed all my relatives who kept posting Trump memes over the last 4 years and our relationship improved greatly. I checked up on them around the holidays and birthdays, which turned out to be more than enough to scroll through all the hate and get to the real stuff that made us friends in the first place.
I definitely delete. I think my sm is locked down pretty good. I use an abbreviated version of my name, rarely put up a recent photo, I don’t advertise my birthday, and prevent tags from reaching my timeline ( HS friends are always trying to tag me in old photos). My lists are private too. I recently purged unknowns from my friends list as some I truly have no idea who they were even though we had many friends in common from HS. There were some real life losers who I crossed paths with way back then, I don’t want them rising up from the past to greet me.
This isn’t a thing I’m really worried about nor going to filter my requests based on someone else down the line. I’m also not in any friend group clusters like “Twenty people from my old school or job”.
Again, my profile is public. You don’t need to friend me to stalk me. No one wants to stalk me though
Lots of my posts are various interest and hobby (including nature photography) related in Facebook groups. It isn’t unusual at all for me to get friend requests from people I don’t know that share my interests. I look at their profiles, and if it looks like they have a real personal interest in x and aren’t just dealers looking to sell me something, I accept the request.
(One of those “friends” through meteorite collecting is “friends” with an astronaut. The astronaut (in his offical, space-suited NASA photo) has popped up in my Friends suggestions before. I wanted an astronaut friend, too, until I saw his feed was so full of right-wing talking points that he should have been wearing a MAGA hat in the photo.)
Even when I know them, I ask myself am I interested in hearing about the doings of their kids? Or what they are doing, for that matter. If not, I ignore or delete. I’m on FB mainly to hear about my kids and grandkids.
I usually click on the requester’s name or photo, which takes me to their homepage. Most of the time, there’s little to no info about them. Just a few sexy pix of a pretty young woman to lure me in. I delete the request.
There’s also friend “suggestions.” These are routinely sent to you by the Facebook software, not by the suggested person. Unless you have some mutual friends, delete these too.
In those cases, I usually just text/call the person and let them know. Every once in a while, they had something go wrong previously and now have a new account and are refriending everyone, but the vast majority of the time, that’s not the case.
Yeah, depending on my mood i may delete, ignore, or accept Facebook friend requests from people i don’t know but who share my hobbies. It’s not too hard to tell those ones when they are legit.
I also get completely random friend requests. I generally delete those. Sometimes i just ignore them. But i don’t accept them.
And yeah, I’ve gotten the friend request from a fake version of a person i know. Those are annoying. I’ve accidentally accepted one or two of those, and then gone back to delete them. Mostly i catch them and delete/report them.
I occasionally send friend requests to people who I don’t expect to know me. Writers, performers, etc., who are marginal or former public figures. Or classmates from long ago.
When I do, I make sure to explain that they don’t know me, and I know them from wherever/whenever.
Any unknown requests I get had damn well better do the same thing, or they get deleted.
But, as JoeyP made clear in post #20, by confirming requests from people you don’t know, you may be helping to legitimize the profile of someone who is targeting someone else, not you, for stalking or a scam. Even if you perceive no downside to yourself, you can’t be sure your action won’t play a small role in harming someone else.
As for me, virtually all the friend requests I get from unknown people are (allegedly) from middle-aged white men and I have zero doubt that it is scammers looking for lonely older women to target. I ignore all of them and occasionally go through and delete them. But I virtually never sign onto FB anyway - the only reason I go there these days is because some of my friends insist on using FB Messenger to send communications, for reasons I don’t understand (we have each other’s email addresses).
I might be. It’s probably a bajillion times more likely that someone just liked a response I made on some other post (possibly something like a news post, etc so we have no connecting friends) and thought I might be worth following.
I am on 6 paleontology groups, 4 local history groups, plus 11 various others at the moment, including ones focused on praying mantises and land snails.
I live in a small town (20,000) and belong to several FB community groups. I am a fairly active poster in a number of those groups. I get a lot of friend requests from members of those groups. Other than the FB group, however, I have nothing in common with those folks, and I don’t consider them friends, so I delete those requests.
I have a similar odd occurrence in a different social media site. Strava. com is a website where runners and bikers track their workouts; it records and shows splits, elevations, heart rate, etc. In addition to seeing your own runs, you can also follow other athletes, and see their workouts. And, as with Facebook, you can “like” a friend’s post; although Strava calls them “kudos”.
Lately I’ve been getting kudos from people I don’t know. There’s a guy in South Africa, another in the U.K., and a pretty young woman from somewhere in South America. The South African and British guys follow me. Now, in contrast to my Facebook account, where I’m pretty conservative about friend requests - I only have about thirty friends - I’m a Strava slut; I’ll follow and give kudos to just about anyone I’ve ever met and run with. But they are people I have actually met and chatted with. I don’t give kudos to strangers, and I have no idea why they give them to me.
If they’re attempts at scamming me, I can’t see how they work; giving me a kudo won’t automatically cause me to follow you or engage with you. It is possible to comment on another person’s run, but none of these folks ever do. I did check out the profile of the South American girl who gave me a kudo once, and it did have semi-sexy pictures of her in tights and sports bras. But those are running gear, and her profile showed fairly regular runs and workouts, so it looked legit. And she never attempted to contact me, so I don’t think it was a honeypot scam.
Getting kudos from strangers isn’t an annoyance or danger; it’s just an oddity that puzzles me.
