I’ve known her since we were nine. It’s not her fault I can’t stand her. Well, maybe it’s partly her fault: she baldfacedly lied to me on her (first) wedding day. A fairly minor lie, but whatever. I don’t particularly like her and don’t particularly trust her. I’m not interested in things she’s interested in and I think she has catastrophic taste in men. Her personal style sets my teeth on edge. She has a habit of inadvertently revealing one’s sensitive information to others. She gossips. Back in the day, she drank and used drugs and tried to peer-pressure me to join in. Not terribly hard, mind you.
We were friends back in the day because our parents were, though I like her parents far less than I like her – her mother was condescending and rude to me, and went out of her way to denigrate things I liked to do. We went to their house for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners almost every year for a decade, and I remember those occasions as the most uncomfortable social occasions of my childhood.
I’ve talked with this former friend a handful of times since we graduated high school 20-odd years ago, and I can’t say I think she’s improved any as an adult. She’s no monster; she’s nothing like as cruel as her mother, she’s intelligent, she has kids who are probably cute. She means well.
How evil am I to keep hitting “ignore” when she sends me a friend request? She sent the second one today. It’s not that I particularly want to snub her – I just don’t want to picture her reading my dorky little status updates and such.
My little sister, on the other hand, and most of the rest of our my Facebook-using classmates have friended her. I’d hoped she’d give up on me after the first request, but now I bet my ignoration will stand out to her.
Yes, this is trivial and so is Facebook. I know. How evil am I anyway?
Eh, not evil. I just figured out who the hell one of my Facebook friends is - she sent me a Facebook birthday greeting so I went out of my way to figure out who it was. (We’ve been Facebook friends for about 6 months - I’ve deduced that she got married and changed her name).
Anyway, she’s a very unfortunate girl from junior high and high school that I was never friends with. I don’t actually think she was friends with anyone - she was very akward and had really unfortunate personal habits and got picked on quite a bit.
However, I inspected her profile and she seems to be married to a man who is pretty cute, and has a couple of very cute children, and seems pretty happy which is good. I’m sure we’re not going to go out anytime soon (or anytime, really) but it costs me nothing to be Facebook friends with her.
Mind, there are a couple of other people that poked me (I HATE that) who I’ve ignored every time. Annoying, obnoxious people that I didn’t like in high school and can’t imagine that I would like now.
I guess you need to decide which group this gal is in and go with it.
Not evil in the slightest. I’ve ignored a couple of Facebook friend requests from people I didn’t like in high school. One of them lives in Michigan now, too (I went to high school in California), so I ignored his request double fast. I am not interested in renewing all acquaintances I’ve ever had.
Well… accepting a Facebook friend request is a pretty low denominator of friendship. I’m friends with dozens of people who I’d never give a second thought to, but if they cared enough to look me up, I’ll friend them. No, you’re not evil for hitting ignore, and I do it on occasion too.
Who sends out a second one after being ignored once? What, did she not get the hint?
You know, I don’t know whether you can tell if you’ve been, you know, just plain ignored, versus hit-the-ignore-button ignored. The first time was a while ago and she might have just forgotten she asked already.
alice_in_wonderland, you’re spot on: right now I think I basically see her as being some of each, and I think that’s why I’m being so agony-y about it. She was awkward and needy (and who wouldn’t be, with a mother like hers), though popular in some circles… where I wasn’t welcome and didn’t want to be. We did have some heart-to-heart talks. Besides holidays, our families also went on camping and cross-country skiing trips together, and we’d hang together. So she’s not exactly just an acquaintance, either.
It occurs to me, after seeing your responses, that I’m probably overthinking this because I think she’s the kind of person who will take it personally, and it will inevitably get back to my *own *mom if she does. Then I get to explain AGAIN why we’re not best of friends like the folks wanted us to be.
You can’t. Brainiac4 was making this complaint to the Facebook execs (he has a weird job) and they said “you know, they don’t get a message or anything that you ignored them - to them, they can’t tell if your ignoring them, or haven’t logged into your Facebook account in six months.”
If I was Queen of Facebook, I think I’d just make it so you’re only ever allowed to ask someone once, regardless of why you didn’t get an answer. Facebook already tells you forty or forty-five times whenever you have any requests, or pokes, or Wall posts, or particularly productive nose-picking events to know about.
I’d put it a little higher than once - maybe three times per year - but yeah, I get what you are saying…‘friends’ I barely know crawling out of the woodwork (and from under rocks) to mingle with coworkers I have to pretend I’m professional around are one of the issues with Facebook.
My ‘favorite’ facebook feature is seeing photos of old boyfriends under “people you might know because they know people you know.” Ack! Yes, I know him - no I never want to be exposed to the mere fact of his existence again!
You do know that you can block her from reading your status updates, right? That’s one of the coolest things about Facebook, the fact that you can block people from viewing very specific parts of your profile without them knowing. In that blue bar on the top of the screen, you’ll see Settings. Choose Privacy Settings, then Profile. Choose which parts of your profile you don’t want her to see. Then, you can friend her without worrying that she has access to your email address, phone number, status updates, etc.
Or just don’t friend her. I had a girl I loathed in high school friend me. I friended her back, and the unfriended her after I realized I still didn’t like her. That’s much more evil than not friending someone at all, yet I do not feel bad about it at all.
One of the nice things about Facebook is that you can set up different groups of friends and then restrict access to things like photo albums and other info based on what group they are in. For example, I don’t think there is a need for my coworkers to see my photo album from Spring Break 95 or my family photos for that matter.
Sometimes Facebook is nice. I’ve reconnected with actual friends I haven’t seen since high school or college. It’s also kind of a nice networking tool for when you meet friends of friends or “single serving friends” at a party or something.
What is a little weird is when people who I didn’t particularly like and who didn’t particularly like me want to “friend” me. A douchebag roomate. Some annoying girl I used to pick on in 4th grade (apparently she never did ‘grow into’ her looks), some asshole from my hockey team who used to always complain how his back hurt (apparently he is still having major back problems). It also helped remind me why I didn’t keep in touch with some people (oh great…so you’ve become one of those fitness lunatics with nothing in his appartment but a combo VHS player/TV, some old plastic chairs and a pull-up bar).
Can you block specific people? I only see how to block categories of people by whether they’re friends, or friends of friends, or from a particular network. I don’t think I can ask her to join a special, exclusive Partly Ignored network…
(on Preview)
Aha! This is what I need! Can you point me in the right direction to create a group like that?
I don’t see you as evil either. If you don’t like this person then don’t “friend” her. Even if it means you’ll have mom on you. You’re an adult so mom has to realize that it’s not her decision.
This. If I can figure out who someone is and they aren’t actually an enemy, I’ll add them. It might make them a teeny bit happier for an instance and it doesn’t require anything extra on my part. Of course it would be different if I were deeply concerned about my privacy, but then I’d have to ask myself if I should be more selective in my posting and what I was doing on Facebook.
I don’t think ignoring people is evil, nor is it good. I’d call it neutral.
As for not getting the message after being ignored the first time, it’s possible you’re name has been presented to her on lists of “people you may know” or some other automated Facebook thingy and she doesn’t remember having asked you before or isn’t even paying attention to the names.
There’s a girl who I was friends with as a child until I realized she was a raving lunatic, and she started stealing stuff from me. Now she’s married and about to have triplets and has tried friending me twice, but I decline. Other friends have friended her but I say fuck it.
I know it doesn’t cost anything to friend someone, but sometimes some of the status updates and wall comments and stupid apps pile up, and I get a little crabby when I miss stuff from people I actually care about because there’s all this chaff from people I don’t care so much about.
Plus, what if she starts posting stuff that just makes you hate her more and then you want to un-friend her and it becomes a mess?
If you hover next to the person’s name in your feed and click Options, you can select More/Less about [name] or More/Less [story type] Stories. There’s also Options For News Feed at the bottom of the page.
Oh, right, the topic. No, not evil. Unless she only has like five Facebook friends, if it actually bothers her, that’s her problem.
Click on the Friends -> All Friends link and you should see a “Make a New List” button.
In the Privacy->Profile section or in each photo album, you can customize which friends can view each item by selecting the lists.
Clearly the psycho religeous fanatic ex-coworker of mine would have the least amount of access.
There was a girl I knew in high school, we weren’t especially close but we were friendly enough - didn’t really hang out together but I enjoyed her company to chat with in class or if I bumped into her at a party or whatever. In university I ran into an ex-boyfriend of hers and we dated for about three weeks. I got the impression later that she was furious with me over this, and I was surprised as I definitely had not thought I was treading on forbidden territory. (I wouldn’t have even known how to contact her to talk about it or anything.)
I was disappointed at having made an enemy and 10 years later when I noticed her on Facebook through a mutual friend’s page, I sent her a message complimenting her on some photos of her travels and hoping that we had grown up enough to put the past behind us and regain that casual friendliness I had once enjoyed.
She ignored me, which, while certainly not something I have lost any sleep over, was sort of disappointing.
Elret, I’ve had a few of those – I got my degree in theater at a very very very small college, which meant that after the first six weeks, you couldn’t date *anyone *from school without it being someone else’s ex. The intensive program kept us too busy to meet anyone from outside school, so it was quite the incestuous little cesspool. Some people handled that better than others. Facebook reintroduced many of us to each other fifteen years later, and it’s been a good thing, even with some folks I didn’t get along with well back then.
Yeah, experiences like yours are part of why I feel evil about ignoring this woman. But she’s had three whole decades to irritate me!