I check out Facebook about once or twice a month and have zero news-feed updates. I hated getting all the constant spam: “Vicky is feeling sad,” “Brian is going to Springfield tomorrow,” “Suzie is home sick today.” I don’t give a rats ass, even though they are friends. Perhaps that’s the situation with 20% of your friends.
I remove people from my friends list if we don’t have any sort of contact either through facebook or in real life.
I also set up multiple tiers of friends lists based on important. Every so often I check to see if I want to promote or demote friends via the tiers. If they are in the bottom tier for a bit, I remove them.
I have de-friended exactly two people, and I put up with a lot before doing so as I wasn’t sure at the time if it actually notified them. But at that point I was done:
Litmus test #1: The friend never had anything to say, but participated in every, and I mean EVERY game, test, quiz, etc. that Facebook ever had, and then tagged me to do so as well. I was not interested. The one time there was a non-game/quiz related item, it was very right wing religious. C’ya.
Litmus test #2: Despite what you might think from item #1, I vote Republican, but am very moderate. Along comes the friend who is very, very left. This one gets on a soapbox every time Fox News says something dumb, or when the Huffington Post decides that something is a Republican conspiracy. I don’t really care one way or the other as I’m not political, but EVERY post from this friend with the soapbox is an underhanded jab about “how can I vote Republican?” I ignore them. Then one day, I decide to finally respond to one about the Haiti earthquake. I am immediately attacked by all her other friends, who are even more radical left than she is. That was enough drama for me. C’ya.
Plenty of other people have friended me who then never comment on anything because they are never online (like my Mom). Others, like very attractive co-workers from former jobs who I barely keep in contact with, have hundreds/thousands of friends, and so my post may get buried below their other feeds. No big deal. I have a manageable number of friends, but don’t really notice if any one of them doesn’t comment on something even if it is a big deal to me.
I added someone I vaguely knew from work, and ALL her posts were about Jesus. Holy fucking shit, it was insane. I put up with it for about six status updates, until she posted one that started with “Circumcise my heart!”
I hit the hide button with great vengeance after that one. Seriously, what does that even mean?
An acquaintance in my circle of friends deleted me for that latter reason. I understand where he’s coming from, as he has few friends and doesn’t check Facebook that often. I probably completely dominated his wall. He could have hid me, but he probably didn’t know such an option existed. There was some other unpleasantness (over now) that I think sealed the deal. For what it’s worth, I use my Facebook as a blog of sorts for sharing interesting links to videos/articles/etc, and the vast majority of my friends appreciate and comment on said links. C’est la vie.
I think that’s incredibly short sighted and presumptive. There’s no one correct way to use facebook.
Some people like to lurk but don’t feel the need to hit the ‘like’ button or comment on everything (and similarly don’t expect that from their friends). Likewise, some people have a lot of friends, and only look at the combined ‘feed’, in which case, even assuming they check every day, other people’s posts may have pushed your post to the second page already, in which case they wouldn’t have read it.
Plus, if you really expect someone to formally acknowledge your “special life event”, etiquette dictates that you send out a real announcement through the postal service, or at the very least, give them a call.
-
Do I remember who this person even is? Occasionally I’ll delete people who randomly friended me but whom I can’t really say I have a sense of who they are, or how they friended me.
-
Do I still desire to see what’s going on in their life? I won’t actually delete someone who I know well enough but don’t really care to keep track of them, however, my piont here is that I friend someone because I want to see *their * posts, not because I give a flying fuck how often they pay attention to mine.
-
Have they horribly offended me in some way… on purpose? This has never happened to me.
-
Is the being their facebook friend is annoying to being their facebook friend is annoying ratio more than say, 3:1? Note that I don’t usually care if the ratio is even 50:1 if it’s merely “being friend is neutral” to “being friend is rewarding”, given some arbitrarily low excuse such as “I know them in real life” or “they think I’m cool”. I’ve occasionally deleted people who I didn’t know in real life, if the majority of their posts were game notices or requests for me to do things. And there was one person who posted a lot of things that I found morally or politically offensive, and they weren’t someone I knew in real life, so I deleted them. Generally I won’t delete someone I know in real life.
Of course, you are entitled to use whatever criteria you like. But personally I don’t go on Facebook to be an attention whore.
Tshirt!
Band name!
Porn film…?
. Oh lord yes…I have a friend who was doing that, and I just blocked her.
Plenty of people appreciated her videos (which were ALL music, btw), too. I guess I don’t see the point in completely hiding a person’s feed instead of removing them. I’ve hidden applications, but not people. I mean, if it gets to the point where you just don’t want to see anything they put up…
If I find their posting style annoying but still basically consider them a friend, I’ll hide them so that I don’t see their updates, but they can still continue to see mine if they want, and if I ever feel like posting something on their Wall, I can, etc. If it’s someone I just really don’t care about or want to hear from ever again, then yes, I’ll just de-friend them completely.
I don’t tend to friend people I don’t give a damn about to start with. I’ve hidden a few people who use Facebook constantly to tell me about things I don’t want to know about (some people use Facebook constantly, but are generally amusing about it, those I keep around). I’m about to hide one Mom of young children - I knew her a while ago, she was a fun person, haven’t seen her in years, and now her Facebook comments are all about children I was unaware existed until I accepted the friend invitation.
The reason I hide them is that way if something big happens (my extended circle is large) that happens through the grapevine and I want to keep up on (for instance, a year ago an old friend I don’t see often died of breast cancer) I can unhide them and stay abreast of what they choose to tell Facebook. That way I’m informed to let others who don’t use facebook know what is going on, and I’m one less person that needs to be told.
I generally don’t congratulate/commiserate too much on Facebook. I see people in person. I send them an old fashioned card. Facebook is a place where “congrats on the baby” looses all meaning to me.
And I miss a lot of statuses unless I take the time to dig for them. Facebooks newer interfaces are CRAP.
GB is on my fan page list, I decided to 'like" him to balance out my other left leaning tree hugging hippie music fan pages.That and I figure if any of his worshippers visit my page maybe I can convert them to my side. he has lots of haterfriendz btw, just read his feed they outnumber his followers 2 to 1 
Ditto.
Also: Liking Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and posting anything even remotely teabagger-ish.
What’s the minimum number of exclamation points acceptable in a comment on your baby?
I just looked up my posts about my wedding and the following wedding pictures. About 15% of my friends commented or liked them. Wow, my friends suck I guess!
Why all the concern with cyber-friends? What about your “real” friends? Don’t you communicate with them any more or has everything got to happen via your keyboard?
I have only defriended two people, and one was a total accident. My only litmus test is if they post things on a consistent basis that I don’t want my children to see. When one friend posted a picture of a mostly naked man and started talking about his… erm… attributes, I defriended him pretty quick.
Yeah, I hid a guy who was taking quizzes that I didn’t want to see. Dude, no one wants to be forced to think about you doing that, especially when kids are in the room.
I hide people who are family or tangential friends (like, married to my friends) when I’m not interested in what they’re posting, but still might want to check up on them and see them in my profile once in a while, or who I am fine hearing about my status.
Like, I hide my glurgy relatives who constantly post about religion, but I have no problem with them reading my status or looking at my pictures, and I’m sure that some of them like to keep up on that. I figure defriending someone cuts them off completely, and I only do that to people I actively dislike, whereas hiding someone is just me deciding that their day to day life isn’t of interest to me.
OP, I think you’re overreacting and making some big assumptions. I, for one, almost never comment on facebook birth/engagement/whatever announcements, because I don’t want to get an email from facebook every time the next few dozen people do so as well. I need the email feature turned on to participate in other discussions on facebook, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to, say, stop giving me the damned emails after I haven’t responded to 3 of them, so I don’t comment or like posts that are likely to be high in traffic that I don’t care about.
Holy crap that’s insane.