Me too. Also been online 25 years, and am an avid Facebooker.
No, it doesn’t sound right. Your paranoia caused you to lash out at that poor woman who didn’t do anything wrong.
It’s not uncommon for people to post tributes to their spouses on Facebook. It’s kind of gross.
Listen, it was a serious breach of netiquette, no question. But you can repair it, sending a message something like this:
As for the purported “breach of netiquette” that she committed, it’s nonexistent. I’ve been online since the late eighties, on BBSs back when modems were 200 baud, and I’ve never encountered a rule like the one you made up to describe to her. I’ve read many pages describing netiquette in my day, and that rule has appeared nowhere. She acted impeccably, comforting a friend. You acted indefensibly.
Did you miss a “not” in your first sentence?
In my mind it’s nothing worse than walking up to a few people talking and saying “can I borrow you for a minute?” It would never occur to me they were off to talk about me in private.
Dude, way to put a negative spin on it.
Who, me? Nope: there was definitely a massive breach of netiquette. It consisted of firing off an angry email to someone who was innocently comforting a friend. It didn’t consist of innocently comforting a friend.
Right. Gotcha. My bad.
I have been online for many, many years, and nope, I am not seeing any breach here on HER part.
Is it clumsy? Yeah a little. (As was said upthread) but hardly some sort of rude behavior. Again, at least on HER part.
Also, I see people tag spouses or family members all the time in posts where they are talking about “if it weren’t for the loving support of <whoever> then I don’t know what I would do.” Pretty common.
I don’t see any sort of breach of etiquette here at all, and I’d be a bit confused - at best - by your patronising messages.
In particular, if the person who commented that they had sent a PM is not one of your wife’s friends on Facebook, her PM is likely to be sent to a more obscure part of Facebook’s messaging system. So commenting like that is a (common, in my exerience) way of saying “Hey, I sent you a message, but you’ll need to look in that daft separate inbox thing for it” in those circumstances. Which makes your paranoid, patronising rant even less comprehensible.
Adding to the chorus, she was not rude. It’s common for me to see “PM sent” messages on Facebook. It never occurred to me to consider it rude. As to why people do this? Got me. I’ve always just assumed it’s to publicly show “I care” without going into details.
Maybe the woman wanted to show support for your wife - perhaps through telling her own story, without splashing personal private details of her own medical struggles all over a public forum.
FB constantly changes the way its message alerts happen. Previously you’d get a little note on the page itself, and an email. Now you might get an email a day or two later, but only if you’re already friends with the person. Less frequently you get a notification on the page. If you’re not friends, the message goes into an ‘other’ folder (one of two) that doesn’t give any kind of notification at all- you actually have to go into the message page and select a different tab. For someone who isn’t super computer savvy (or distracted), it’s easy to miss a PM, which is why most people default to “Sending PM.”
LHOD had the best answer, IMNSHO. I would love to know what the first angry response (the one before the condescending apology) said. “Hey, stop trying to comfort my wife behind my back AND mind your own business about the fact that I’ve actually been in love with your daughter for 20 years, you bitch!” :rolleyes:
To add: even if there HAD been a breach of netiquette, it almost certainly wouldn’t warrant an angry email, much less a fake apology that further criticizes.
Just that you’re even still using the term “netiquette” is really dating yourself in terms of your perceptions about how online communication works on the internet today.
To be that far out of touch with Facebook norms and then pretend to apologize for a misguided PM by ‘educating’ this poor woman about how much more you know than she does about the interwebs is pretty comical.
As for harboring a years-long secret attraction to a much younger woman who happens to be this woman’s daughter, and someone you and your wife both remain in close contact with even today while it remains a secret from all of them including your wife: IMHO it isn’t her, her mother, or your wife that will be responsible for any awkward Facebook moments you might ever have as a result. Good luck with all that.
People will post something like “sending you a PM” to publicly show that they are supporting a person, whilst keeping the details of that support private. It’s just the crazy world we live in these days, where **how we are seen to behave by others **is more important to us than how we actually behave.
No, that doesn’t sound right to me. To me, it is the equivalent of saying to someone “I need to catch you later to discuss something”.
It can come in handy.
Friday night we were at a blues bar enjoying Little Ed & The Blues Imperials. Great band, good crowd, pretty loud.
GF discretely checked in on Facebook, tagging me, and mentioning how nice it was to see my buddy Gil in the crowd.
My phone vibrated, I saw her check-in, looked around and spotted Gil for the first time. I later worked my way over to Gil and we caught up between sets. So, yeah.
I’m confused, why couldn’t your GF have…spoken to you?
Unless I’m being whoosed?
It was LOUD and we were enjoying the music.
Beyond that, I wear a hearing aid that makes it difficult/impossible to converse in loud settings.
I think that is needlessly harsh. First, one can do both- be seen supporting someone and actually supporting them as well.
In some circumstances, showing that you are supporting someone is very important, especially if it’s a possibly controversial circumstance (coming out, having a family crisis, revealing an illness with a stigma attached). It sends the message to the larger community that this individual is being supported.
It can let other people in the circle of friends know who they can reach out to (reach out to everyone who posted to organize meals or family help, for example).
It can feel good to the person needing support to show they are surrounded by caring people. Sure, they can read the private note, but it can feel good to scroll down through your Facebook feed and see all the names and words.
Finally, it can alert the person to even look for a message. If they don’t use facebook messenger often, and not have notifications set up, they may not even know to look.
So sure, it can be done for shallow reasons, but it’s an unfair de facto assumption.