I recently had a baby and posted the announcement and pictures for a couple of days after. Probably 20% of my “friends” who are active FBers never commented, liked or acknowledged the birth in any way. I’m thinking this is a good litmus test as to whether or not you are just a number in their list or if they are actually friends worth keeping on FB.
I will likely delete them from my friend list.
What do you think? What are your litmus tests?
Perhaps those people don’t check their facebook but once a week?
Congratulations on your and your child’s safe delivery, but the world doesn’t revolve around the two of you.
If someone just had a baby, that’s a good time to delete them. They will likely become completely wrapped up in themselves and post every stupid thing their baby does (Caleb threw up today!) and act as if they are the first people on planet earth to ever procreate. Pretty fucking boring.
I think that might be a bit overboard. I see stuff on facebook all the time that I think is exciting, and great for the people involved, but I don’t have to let them know it 24/7.
If you sent all of these people a message saying you were de-friending them because they didn’t congratulate you on your new baby, what do you think their response would be?
I would think it over carefully before you start ending friendships or cutting off connections over something like this.
Also, Facebook has a mechanism where not every one of your friends will necessarily see your post on their newsfeed.
Just noticed I neglected the second question in the OP.
My litmus test is if they’ve Become a Fan of Glen Beck’s page. Liking Glen Beck gets you kicked out of Pullet’s nest.
I generally only de-friend someone if I really don’t want anything to do with them ever again. Like my sister’s ex-husband. I hide 90% of my friends list from my news feed so everyone else is out of sight, out of mind.
Also if they were really that close to you, wouldn’t they already know from face to face contact? Like, wouldn’t you care enough to tell them instead of trusting that they’d check the website first?
Despite this being the biggest thing that’s ever happened to you, it’s a minor blip to everyone else, and you better get used to this - that attitude is going to get you nowhere fast (I say this as a first time mum to a 7 month old). They might have noticed and thought nice things, they may not have noticed it in amongst the screeds of crap which litter most people’s feeds. It’s no big deal.
Surely the question is rather why did you not tell all of these friends of yours in person? Email, phone call, visit etc. If you don’t value them enough to tell them personally, they may not think it any big deal not to have mentioned it on your feed.
I only defriend people if I’ve actively started to hate their guts. I think in my case this happened once, or maybe never. People unfriend me not infrequently though, but there never seems to be a common factor. No hair off my chest, as only a couple of times has it been anyone worth a damn to me, and in that case the reason was obvious (and sad).
See the baby! See the baby! Facebook really does magnify this to the MAX!
I announced my engagement over a month ago; about thirty percent of my FB friends made comments. A lot of them never even saw it; I’m still getting congrats from people who aren’t online all that often.
I know that a new baby is the newest and most exciting thing that’s ever happened to you, but…and I say this with the best intentions…Facebook and friends and life are all full of new babies. And pictures of little kids “graduating” kinder. And teenagers with sports trophies. And also people with job promotions. And new houses. And marriages. And divorces. The list goes on. Do YOU comment on all of their moments/achievements? I doubt it.
If this doesn’t make sense to you, perhaps you should indeed delete those people, or even delete your Facebook account.
Because of the way the newsfeed comes in, it’s not that difficult to miss one status change from one person. I don’t have a huge number of friends, but I have missed a couple of things I really should have commented on and had to catch up later.
My sister-in-law is currently pissing me off by not acknowledging things I’ve specifically put on facebook for her, like pictures of her goddaughter’s christening that she couldn’t be there for. I even tagged her in the pictures despite her absence, to make sure she would get a notification. She couldn’t even be bothered to like the album. That, to me, is pretty rude, but I’m not going to defriend her for that. I knew she was that oblivious and self-centred before facebook ever existed.
The only thing I’ve ever defriended anyone for was when they suddenly started posting racist “jokes” and remarks as their status.
I don’t have a simple rule of thumb for removing people from Facebook. However, if I am regularly being spammed with meaningless message, I will find ways to put him/her on an ignore list.
Usually people who get the cut are ‘friends’ I don’t really know well, didn’t share any meaningful experiences with or have no interest in. Do you want to stay in touch with those people? If I answer yes, then yah they stay.
This probably has all the gravity and implications of deciding whom to send Christmas cards to.
If they are dead you should delete them from the list.
I got defriended when someone posted a picture of their dog and I said it was the ugliest mongrel I had ever seen.
I didn’t lose any sleep over it.
I’ve added people in facebook, not commented on them on years, and suddenly they start posting stuff and I realize that he/she and I share a lot more in common than what I thought we had (attended the same schools, for example). There are probably some I should delete, but my list is not so huge that it needs constant trimming. Plus many of them are in a different list than the closer friends.
As to your comment. Quite a few of my friends have had babies in the last few years. I was raised with “if you have nothing good to say about baby, stay shut!”. And, IMHO, most newborn babies are rather ugly. So I sometimes won’t mention anything about the baby until months later (almost a year in one case), until I see them look cute. I’m still waiting for that time for a couple of them…
I think I wrote (and posted pictures) when I graduated vet school, and also mentioned my grandpa’s death. And in my joy and my grief, most of the people who could see the messages and photos, DID NOT comment on them. That’s OK. There shouldn’t be that expectation. Besides, about half of the list saw me graduate, they were my classmates, after all. And my relatives had other ways to know about my grandpa. And some of my friends knew from other sources.
In short… IMHO, your litmus test fails, and is not good. Ask yourself if you’ve truly commented on every single one of their achievements, and it is likely you’ve missed at least a couple.
I’ve only defriended one person on Facebook. She was making negative comments about my status updates or what pages I chose to Become A Fan of, and insulting actual friends who made supportive comments. Sorry, buh-bye.
The only time I delete people from facebook is if more than 60% of their posts make me angry. If you want to post a political rant from time to time or talk about how much people who don’t love god suck I can ignore it. I don’t need you to agree with me about everything, after all. But when it seems like every single one of your posts is about something that horrifies me then I’m not keeping you on my facebook.
My aunt deleted me from her friend list because I didn’t want her three year old at my wedding reception. Rather than pushing me to reconsider my decision not to have kids at the ceremony it just makes me feel like she is a shitty person who doesn’t understand that just because she squeezed a kid out of her uterus doesn’t mean either she or the kid deserves to be put on a pedestal. Keep that in mind before you delete people from facebook for not commenting on the birth of your child.
This is pretty much how I feel. I don’t keep score of who does and does not post on my status updates or photos, but if all you ever post is badly misspelled screeds about how Obama is ceding half of Arizona back to Mexico, you’re outta there, baby.
I think you are going overboard. Congratulations on having a new baby, but I have a number of friends who have recently had babies and I didn’t comment on all of the status updates or pictures. I will at some point, but I’ve been pretty busy lately and/or only accessing FB with my phone, so don’t really have the time or means to look at every picture and make comments. Also, I find that men tend to not really comment on this stuff as much as women do, so consider the sex of these friends.
If someone deleted me for this reason, I’d think I was better off without them.