Fortunately, no. And if it were anyone else, that’d be my first thought, too.
First thing you need to understand is that some people update their FB statuses via text message-- meaning they maybe can’t SEE your birth announcement when you post it. I have friends that will “update” their Facebooks, but not actually get on for days. Hell, sometimes even my FB for Blackberry app goes all wacky for a few days and I’m only able to post, not read. It happens. But hey, do what you want.
And uh, I can only speak for myself, but I don’t think anyone has ever described me as anti social or socially awkward in my whole life, thanks. Disagreeing with you doesn’t mean I’m living in my mom’s basement, talking to my WoW “friends” while someday dreaming of making a real friend.
For what it’s worth, I “hide” the people who constantly post shit from games (I don’t care about fucking Farmville) or are spamming my goddamn feed with updates about their children every moment of every day (every so often a note that lil Timmy’s walking or whatever is fine, but I don’t need to hear every time he’s having a bowel movement, thanks!).
The only time I’ve deleted people is when 1: they were sharing information from my profile (pictures, things I’m doing, etc.) with people I am not friends with IRL or on FB, due to past issues or 2: they post idiotic, racist, and bigoted political drivel or flat out wrong political news. If you say Obama is implanting microchips into all of us and I show you an article explaining the misunderstanding that led to people thinking that, your response shouldn’t be, “BUT OMGZZZ HE IS!!! IT’S BECAUSE HE’S MUSLIM!!11!!” you get deleted.
So it’s okay for you to not reply to others and forget about threads, but others can’t do the same? Hi, pot, meet kettle.
I think it’s funny that anyone who disagrees with you is holier-than-thou when you’re the one all indignant that people didn’t click a friggin’ button on Facebook (when, as others have already said, they may not even be actually on when posting updates).
Wrong. He used passive resistance. If he was passive-aggressive to the British, he would have said, “Oh, no, that’s fine, go on oppressing us! We don’t need human rights or anything.” And then firebombed them anonymously. Or, more accurately, just bitched about them to all the other Indians at the pub.
If privacy is your concern, why are you friends with them in the first place? This seem to me to pretty clearly be nothing but a butthurt reaction to the fact that your little status update–which, in the system, has no more or less priority in people’s news feeds than the friend who just had an epic bowel movement–got overlooked or simply NOT EXPLICITLY ACKNOWLEDGED by some people. You’re punishing them, not by doing anything to address the problem, but by cutting them out of your life.
Why do you care when people look at status updates from you? Are you so self-centered that you have to insist that every single thing you write be read the second it’s written? No one can go back and catch up later? No one can miss an update in a flood of updates from other friends?
The irony; it burns. Also: I heard it’s hard to set threads to auto-subscribe when you post to them.
Active FBers are probably friends with other active FBers. There’s no way to guarantee that your particular announcement made it anywhere in front of their eyes in the swarm of other daily updates. Which is why births are traditionally announced with… wait for it… BIRTH ANNOUNCEMENTS. They’re these crazy things that you send to people–get this–IN THE MAIL. That way, they have an actual piece of paper in their hands, intended just for them. As opposed to some big mass announcement that there’s no guarantee they’ll see.
Would you print your announcement on a piece of paper, tape it to the door of the supermarket, and then get mad at everyone who didn’t call you about it, too?
Cite? Speaking personally, I hate a lot of people, but I’m not antisocial, and I’m sure as hell not socially awkward.
This! This times a billion! Who the hell ARE these people?!
I had a FB “friend” (an old roommate from 10 years ago) send me a PM the other day (3 paragraphs long, mind you) about my status updates being “passive aggressive” retaliations against her previously posted status updates - and that I was her online punching bag and how I had said backhanded things to her in the past and that stuck with her.
I have not seen or spoken to this “friend” in YEARS. I moved away from her because I can’t stand her, and have NO idea why we bothered to be friends on FB. I am now convinced she is a lunatic with too much time on her hands to send me a well-crafted 3-paragraph letter about my character flaws. I have a feeling this is why she is all alone.
You know, people can get annoying with their kid posts, but I’ll tell you what else is annoying that this “friend” did, and I have seen in other people:
- Like, every status is about how I exercise and tan every. friggin. day and that is why I look so good!
- Have I mentioned I live in L.A.?? (complete with photos, famous people sightings, and constant complaining about the traffic on Rodeo Drive).
- Did I mention I live in L.A. and like to exercise?
DELETED.
Huh? What thought?
Presumably, if it were anyone but her sister, she’d assume that the person had also opened the kid’s first charge account.
I thought the whole point of posting something on facebook was so that others needn’t respond. Silly me I guess. And I have never figured out the point of “liking” anything either.
I won’t “like” some things I do actually like because I have my notifications set to email me when someone comments on something I’ve “liked” or commented on myself. If it’s something that’s going to generate a ton of comments, I don’t bother. I have my notifications set up that way so if I need to respond to someone, I don’t have to scroll through the feed to find it later.
(deleted, hit the wrong button. Damn new keyboard!)
Your new keyboard accidentally typed an entire post for you? That’s pretty impressive. (Pssst, those of us who get updates when threads are posted to can sometimes see things before you delete them.)
Or are you just starting over, since it looks like you accidentally submitted halfway through responding?
Sorry for the whoosh, that was a joke. 
[ul][li]Because when I originally joined Facebook I, like most people I know, indiscriminately added a bunch of people that were suggested by my friends. Even though I restricted myself to people that I would recognize if I saw them in the street, some of those are people that I wouldn’t tell about my personal life, because they almost certainly won’t care that much.[/li][li]Because some of the people I have on my Facebook list are people that I used to see regularly (at my church, non-profit group, work) and say hello to and chat with, but now they have moved away to another state and realistically I will hardly ever see or speak to them again.[/li][li]Because I’ve realized that some people at work, whom I consider friends, might inadvertently repeat stuff around the office that I would not want them to repeat. (Example: when I went to Switzerland last summer with my wife, had a discussion with my brother about moving there, and went on a couple of job interviews, my wife poster on her Facebook page “We might be moving to Europe!” One of her Facebook friends is a work colleague of mine, and he asked me in the kitchen at work “When are you guys moving?” Not the kind of news I would want to spread around the office, especially when they were trying to decide who to cut from the team.)[/ul][/li]Maybe you are one of those people that tells everyone they know everything about their private life (like this lady my wife and I saw in the clubhouse area jacuzzi last week-end, who immediately started telling us about her divorce and her son’s girlfriend who’s pregnant but not married but that’s OK because her son’s ex-wife and her son’s kids from the first marriage are fine with it and blah-blah-blah - this lady is someone I’ve never seen before in my life, and her son, sitting right there, was rolling his eyes at her); and that’s OK! It’s all good! But I don’t do that. I like to be a little more selective. Some people, when I meet, will get the benefit of seeing the latest pictures of my little darlings, and the funny things they do at home, because my kids are THE BEST IN THE WORLD!!! Some other people, I don’t mention it to, because I know they are totally indifferent to the latest exploits of my progeny.
Those are just examples, but my general rule is : don’t spread around your personal business to people who have no need or interest in knowing it.
Punishing them? Cutting them out of my life? Be careful, someone is going to accuse you of taking Facebook WAY TOO SERIOUSLY, and then saying you’re old!
I have a life beyond Facebook. Removing someone from my Friends list doesn’t mean I will spit on them if I see them in the street.
Well, if you have so many updates that you are missing my stuff, then how will it hurt you if you don’t see my stuff any more? 
I would think it is more self-centered to assume that my updates play an important part in their life and they will suffer if they don’t see them.
Why do I care? Because for me, that’s my reason for using Facebook: so people I know can keep up with the latest events in my life, and so I can keep up with them. If people aren’t reading my status updates I can remove them from the list that recieves my status postings. Why would I remove them? See above. Don’t spread information around for no reason.
I’ll give you two guesses!
I deleted it because I knew I wouldn’t have time to finish and proof-read my post in the edit time window.
I was worried that you’d started posting and then reconsidered, passing it off as some keyboard error, thereby depriving me of the pleasure of responding without being an ass and copying shit from the email update, which would be uncouth. But, since you did actually respond, snark retracted!
No it wasn’t. A joke is funny.
All of these are reasonable motivations for removing people from your friends list, or at the least moving them to a restricted group of friends who don’t have access to your entire profile. (Security settings are your friend!) None of this has anything to do with deleting people for something as ridiculous as not responding personally to an unpersonalized broadcast communication.
Nope. I hardly post updates to FB at all; and I have a restricted group for people I want on my friends list but specifically don’t want seeing my Wall, status updates, etc. (E.g., my mother, bless her heart, who just can’t learn not to respond to some of the outrageous things some of my friends say just for the sake of being outrageous.) Scrolling back through the thread, it seems that you understand how this works, too.
Three separate issues:
1.) Just because I don’t see every update from a person doesn’t mean I don’t occasionally like seeing some of them.
2.) Just because I don’t keep track of someone’s updates on a daily basis doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally go back and catch up.
3.) Unfriending someone means that not only can they not see your updates, but they can’t access *any *information on your profile that you don’t have available to the general public.
This isn’t about putting people on a separate access list, though. This is about unfriending people entirely.
“Who’s responding” is a terrible criterion for whom to include on which access lists. Removing people from your updates just 'cause they fail to respond smacks of being passive-aggressive. If they don’t want to see the updates, they can easily hide them. Instead, you’re like a little kid saying, “Well FINE, if you don’t want to play by my rules, then I’ll just go home!”
If you’re basing who to include solely off of who’s responding, that’s going to exclude people who might actually enjoy reading your updates and include people who you probably don’t want reading them. And if you don’t feel safe with them reading the updates, why the hell would you wait until they didn’t respond to any to remove them?
And it was! The problem here is that my humour is too sophisticated for some people. But I won’t hold it against you!
That’s where we disagree. I don’t think the OP’s criteria is ridiculous. Sure, if I post “I have the worst cold in the world right now” and people ignore my post, no matter. But a big event like a new baby, a marriage, is worthy of comment. Like if I’m at a party and make a general announcement: “I just had a baby!” The people that turn their head and go back to their conversation without acknowledging it are the ones that don’t care. So I’m not going to go buttonhole them at the next party and tell them all about Junior’s aversion to strained peas.
And me letting someone see my updates, just because they like to see them, could cause me grief. (see the example from my co-worker above.)
So if I happened to unfriend you, I would send you a message explaining why (unless I hate your guts.) If you miss the message, you would eventually notice, and can ask to be my friend again. If you don’t ever notice, obviously depriving you of my updates is no big deal.
Giving less people access to your profile is a good thing - from a privacy and security point of view. If for no other reason that Facebook accounts can get hacked (and used for a phishing scam as one example). So, in general, I think people need to make more of an effort to have access to my stuff, besides the fact that they like seeing one more name on their friends list. That lady from church who moved to Martha’s Vinyard? I’ll never see her again. She can go off my friends list. The other couple who moved to Wisconsin? Same thing.
I think who’s responding, in combination with some other things, is a perfectly fine criterion for removing someone from your list. (Some of the other things: people I don’t know that well, people who I used to know well but have moved away and now I barely hear from them, etc.) If there’s someone who I would normally unfriend, but then remember that she posted something nice when my son won a chess trophy, she will probably get to stay, because obviously she remembers me.
Well, because I assume everyone doesn’t clean up their facebook friends list religiously every day. Once in a while, I’ll look at names and see who I should cut.
I’m a very funny person. This has been verified by science. Your “joke” wasn’t funny, and smacked very strongly of, as Al Franken would say, “kidding on the square.” Or, as I always put it, “ha ha only seriously.”
Terrible analogy. More like you’re standing on a porch at a party, and you say, “I just had a baby!” and the people who hear you say “Congrats!” or maybe smile at you, but you don’t get any response from the people who’re in the living room or the kitchen or the bathroom, so you decide that you’re never again speaking to anybody who didn’t come up and shake your hand right then and there.
To expect a PERSONAL response to an IMPERSONAL announcement is not only ridiculous–it’s rude. It’s selfish. It says, “I don’t care enough about you to do my best to give you this news in a remotely personalized way and ensure that you can actually see it, but I am going to expect that you respond directly to me about it in an explicit way.” That’s juvenile.
And nowhere will you see me advocating this. My point is that RESPONSES should not be your criterion for who gets to see your updates; WHETHER OR NOT YOU WANT THEM READING THEM should be.
Again, NOWHERE HAVE I DISAGREED WITH THIS. This ENTIRE discussion is about this ONE SPECIFIC CRITERION for removing people: in a passive-aggressive hissy fit for not treating you with a level of consideration that you declined to show them in the first place.
If you accept someone as a FB friend, and *the only thing *that has changed between then and now is that they failed to comment on a status update that you thought was important, for you to remove them at that point means that either (a) you shouldn’t have added them in the first place or (b) you’re displaying all the maturity of a petulant child.
Yes, but looks don’t count.
OH MY GOD I AM SO SORRY!! This is clearly not true - I’ve seen your picture -you’re lovely. There are just so few opportunities to use that, I was forced to bust it out. A thousand pardons!!!
Exactly! Jesus Christ.
Whatever. I’m deleting all of you assholes from Facebook. Not a single ONE of you liked the Michael Jackson video I posted an hour ago and I mean fuck, it’s the anniversary of his death and you guys are all jerks. If you don’t care about what’s important to me, I DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU!!!
stomps off
I laughed.
Ugh. For the last time! Not a dude, and not Jewish. I JUST HAVE A BIG NOSE, OKAY?!
6/25 NEVER FORGET!!!