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I’m planning a Facebook-friend cull of the people in my friends list whom I don’t feel especially close to. The thing that’s making me put off the cull is the fear of being asked “Why did you unfriend me?” as this has happened during previous culls.The honest answers range between, “I don’t know you well enough to feel comfortable having you look at all my photos and statuses,” and “I just don’t feel close enough to you.” But do I owe these people (none of whom are close friends) an explanation?
What do fellow Homies do in this situation? Do you ignore the messages? Have blanket statements prepared? Tell them the hard truth? -Natalie
GREAT question, because, sadly, this is a pretty universal problem now. So unfrienders and the unfriended: How do YOU handle this awkward social situation?
I cull people periodically, and I believe I’ve only had someone ask me why I unfriended them once… and it was someone I was not close to _at all_, and he noticed within a day. That seriously creeped me out, so I answered honestly (just removing some people from old social circles) and blocked him.
I always found the people I didn’t know well or that I was never close with asked. However I’ve unfriended people I did know well for various reasons. If they asked why I just told the truth. Some respected that others found themselves blocked.
I have a rule for myself that if someone unfriends me and then comes back years later and friend requests me again, I decline it. This has led to some vitriol, with those people questioning why I won’t accept their new request. I say, whatever your reasons were to unfriend me in the first place, probably still exist, so let’s not bother.
Otherwise, I just say that I’m keeping my list restricted to family and close friends.
I have never had someone ask this of me, but I HAVE been that person! I use FB Purity, so a huge popup shows up as soon as someone unfriends you, and it is kind of like a slap in the face. It isn’t like you’re creeping around, it is just brought to your attention that they deleted you. It is especially upsetting when you can see that it happened right after they posted on one of your threads, so you know what they must have been thinking when they dropped you. When I messaged the person, I did it because I enjoyed being connected to the person, and in their case, I was anticipating seeing them at an upcoming event. I wasn’t actually as awkward as to ask them why they unfriended me, I just said that I was sad that they had unfriended me, explained the above, and then left it at that. They actually said that they had unfriended me by mistake and re-friended me.
I used to do the “unfollow/hide” thing, but I have recently found that Facebook is hiding people from my news feed that I am still following, and I think some of it has to do with the fact that I just have too many “dead friends” in my network. I know it isn’t because they are hiding content from me, because if I go to their page, I will still see things. So I have been making a real effort to prune my connections, and it is slowly making a difference. I am deleting friends that I no longer interact with, and then I am making an effort to actually click “like” on posts for other people I want to see more regularly, because it seems like the FB algorithms depend on that.
I have other friends who regularly do large-scale cullings, and they usually do a warning post, and say that if you really want to be re-added, to message them. These are people who tend to use Facebook differently. I know some people like to keep their network small and intimate, while others use it as a wide and more expansive network.
I’ve had a couple people ask. In one case, I had no memory of unfriending her, and she obviously had no memory of unfriending me, so we put it down to a glitch and re-friended. Another time, I had someone ask almost a year after I’d deleted him, and I was honest: “I felt a need to simplify my life, so I unfriended a bunch of people I don’t talk to regularly. I’d be happy to reconnect if you’d like!” He said he understood but still wanted to stay in touch, so we re-friended. I imagine this would work with most people (with or without the offer to reconnect).
I’m currently trying to figure out how to avoid responding to a friend request that just came in from a relative. It’s kind of an important person in my husband’s family, but I DO NOT want her to have access to anything I’ve ever posted on Facebook, because she is ultra-religious and I am ultra-critical of religion online and I don’t want to make Thanksgivings awkward. Meh.
You could accept her friend request but put her on your Restricted list.
I avoid FB as much as possible, but the same thing happened/happens on livejournal. I tended to wait until I was going to cull my list a lot & mention it casually in a public post right before — with the exception of people I *knew* were going to cause drama about it (usually by whining at my partners, not me) who got to stay but got taken off the list of people I read/could read most of my posts.
Also, I really have to take this opportunity to direct people to Kate Miller-Heidke’s marvelous (NSFW) song about facebook and ex-es
I can’t recall ever being asked, but if I was I would just emphasize that I felt like I was spending too much time on Facebook and needed to step back from it, and part of that was reducing my friends list down to bare minimum of people I was closest to. It’s true and relatively diplomatic, and it puts the emphasis on me taking care of my own needs rather than anything about them, so hopefully they’ll feel less singled out or attacked. I might even say that I wanted to deactivate Facebook entirely because it was eating too much of my time and attention, but worried about the political ramifications with my closest friends and family, so I just did a hefty cull, keeping only those who I thought I couldn’t get away with unfriending. There certainly have been times that this has been true.
I actually had someone who unfriended me because she was mad at me and then was upset that I didn’t ask her why she unfriended me. The person is my SIL and at the time she was a very negative person (she has greatly improved in the last two years) and would have daily rants about people who wronged her (I had actually unfollowed her because I didn’t want to see the rants anymore – I had noticed that she had unfriended me because it was her anniversary so I went to send my BIL/SIL a message). My husband and his brother were going through some rocky times. I had not had contact with my BIL or SIL is a while because my husband had asked me to stay out of things with them while he tried to work things out with his brother. I thought it was a bit odd that she had unfriended me since I hadn’t done anything or had any interaction with her in months. When I noticed that she unfriended me I talked to my husband about it and he told me to let it be and not to rock the boat so that’s what I did (note: my husband and his brother had just got in a fight a couple days earlier about the fact that two months earlier my BIL said he was broke and couldn’t afford my husband’s bachelor party so my husband asked someone else to plan, and now my BIL was offended that my husband asked someone else). About a month later my SIL also unfriended my husband because she heard a rumor that he said something rude at her wedding. My BIL/SIL were furious with my husband but he was oblivious for a week since my BIL was refusing to answer his calls or return his messages (less than a week before this happened my husband and BIL sat down and my BIL agreed to tell my husband when they were mad at us since they had been bottling up things for months/years that we didn’t even know about). A week later my FIL told my husband that my BIL/SIL were mad at him. His brother took another week to finally answer his phone when my husband called. This was about a month before our wedding.
One reason that I’ve told someone that is absolutely true was “Your life was too awesome and I found myself envying instead of enjoying your posts.” and luckily because they were a truly awesome person they understood… but it’s true… sometimes I friend people in my hobby community and I end up wishing I had their lives instead of enjoying the life I have and I have to unfriend them.
For people that I unfriend for other reasons and who ask politely, I usually explain with a “please don’t take this personally but we hadn’t connected in a while so I didn’t think you would mind.” I might re-friend them after having that conversation, but if they are rude or super offended by it I let our friend status stay the same.
After I unfriend someone, I block them. I don’t want to pop in their “people you may know” section, and then they notice that we’re not “friends” anymore. That just adds to the drama, IMO. I pretty much only unfriend people that I never see IRL anymore, so it really has only ever come up once, years and years later.
That’s a good idea! Then if for some reason they notice, they’ll assume you’ve gone from facebook if they go hunting for your profile.
People can still find out you’ve blocked them if they Google your name and find a listing for your profile that they can’t access. At least that’s how I check if someone has blocked me.
I just do it and it’s something I do regularly. I guess people most of the time just get your reason why and move on, for me I suspect they’re aware of the distance and don’t particularly care. I’ve only ever gotten one “why” and I easily explained it as, “we don’t talk anymore especially on here. If you would like to rebuild our friendship you already have my phone number so give me a text sometime and we can hang out our something.” If people don’t have my phone number I have no problems with deleting them. So long as you’re not the main thing in their news feed most people don’t notice but of course your milage may vary and there are neurotic people that do check these things.
I used to do this, and when confronted about it I would be pretty blunt. ‘When was the last time we spoke?’ ‘We never speak’. Now I don’t use facebook for much of anything except sharing links to other things I’m on (blogs, youtube, etc) so I leave whoever on it since no one is seeing anything personal anyway.
What would you say in this situation: my sister in law is not my favorite person, so I removed her and blocked her from my Facebook. She asks me all the time why I am not her Facebook friend, and despite changing my privacy settings she still manages to see my stuff. (I’m guessing my mother in law logs in on her account so my sister in law can snoop.) What do I say to her? I don’t want to be rude, but how is she not getting the hint?
“Because you suck.” or “Because I don’t like you.”
It’s not hard, really.
I recently had to do a little culling due to my divorce. My ex and I are friends but his family makes everything their business and have recently turned super toxic… Stalking events I’m attending, stealing photos of my kids to re-post without permission, and posting every passive-aggressive “you suck” meme they can find on my wall. Le sigh. They are definitely the type of people to make a stink when they realize I’ve unfriended them… I’m just sort of waiting.
My method is to completely avoid this situation. I don’t delete, but mainly because I decided some years ago that Facebook was NOT the place to share anything important to me. I don’t have to worry about random people from the past knowing about my life because I don’t post it, and I don’t worry about offending said randos by deleting them because there’s no reason to do so: I don’t mind sharing memes with randos! Whatever. My real close friends learn about my life by actually talking to me in person, on the phone, or via an email message. The public nature of Facebook severely over-complicates friendships. I’ve lost friendships over Facebook. It’s not worth it to me. I’d rather “cull” myself out of it than risk hurting perfectly fine people’s feelings. People take Facebook seriously, and I recognize that. Look at all the suicides in the news related to social media.
On that not I actually have a friend who deleted me off of Facebook due to political differences (re: tldr arguments) but he is still my friend in real life. That’s right, you can still be friendly After Delete. But not everyone realizes that friendship AD is possible.
Friends I get rid of on a whim as part of a large cull I generally don’t mind too much if they raise a fuss. I answer honestly that I felt we were growing apart but accept their re-friending. If it’s someone I really don’t care to see I unfollow them.
For people I feel a little more strongly about getting rid of I block them first. If I feel it would cause social drama to actually cut them I just live in the limbo of having them technically on my list, but blocked and unfollowed. Otherwise I just hope that blocking them from my posts allows me to drift out of their consciousness so that when I do unfriend them they won’t notice. Hasn’t always worked but I try not to feel too guilty.
I stress a lot about imbalanced friendships, though. People who like me a lot more than I like them. This isn’t to say I “dislike” them; it’s positive vs neutral not vs negative. But I know for some people neutral is almost worse than having some strong negative feeling. I do find this issue manifests itself on Facebook a lot and I find a part of me wishing we were back in a time which when we close a chapter in our lives we can fully move on without our past relationships following us (literally, in the sense of a newsfeed) into the new phase. I comfort myself, however, by recognizing a couple of facts: 1) I only have so much time and energy to spend on only so many relationships; 2) there are far more amazing individuals in the world who would totally be worth my choosing to spend time on. I have to choose somehow. I will inevitably be missing out on someone if I choose someone else. How I make that choice is up to me, but I really shouldn’t feel guilty about making that choice, especially if it is between two equals. Furthermore, because I have only so much time shouldn’t I pick people I actually enjoy being around? If the choice isn’t between equals shouldn’t I pick the superior choice? You wouldn’t tell someone to stay in a romantic relationship their heart wasn’t truly in it just because they felt guilty, so why do we act as if this is the way to handle non-romantic friendships? Besides, would you want a friend who stays around just because they feel guilty to leave?
I know this went to a slightly tangential subject, but essentially my point is: choose to keep and foster friendships that enrich your life. Whether it’s close IRL relationships or simply Facebook connections. And don’t feel guilty about stepping away from those who don’t. In the case of Facebook, if you feel ambivalent and keeping someone on your list doesn’t really make a difference one way or another and they want to stay on, don’t make a mountain out of a mole hill and let them back on. At the end of the day this is your life, your time, and your energy. You have the right to spend it however you see fit.
What’s interesting is that people equate “friends IRL” and “friends on Facebook”. Definitely not the same in my book. Just because we had a great laugh over a movie in a hostel in Latvia 4 years ago doesn’t mean I want to see your life, or want you to see my life once I’m back home. Not the same as the friend who got us through a beak-up or a grandma’s death or extended unemployment.
Also, if I want to “unfriend” someone in real life, I just stop contacting them, period. I don’t see the point in letting them know I’m going to stop contacting them. Friendships fall apart, it’s part of normal life, and even if we had a fight, there’s no point in calling them to say “hey, I’m not going to talk to you anymore”. So I don’t get why all the fuss about explaining oneself about culling on Facebook.
Last, from my experience, the people who want to know why they’ve been culled just want to pick a fight. Don’t worry about them.
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I’ve got an interesting one…..last night my husband says to me “did you see **** got another dog?” I’d never seen the post , and went to her page, only to find out I’ve been unfriended. This person is someone we see throughout the year, and have over for dinner from time to time with her husband. We exchange Christmas and birthday presents too.
How do I handle this? Come out and say “hey, what gives with the unfriending?” Either way, it’s going to be awkward!
I don’t know. I found this question while looking for an answer to the same thing. I’m friends with a crush on facebook. We have several mutual friends and still interact fairly regularly despite not seeing each other in person for a while. So it would be obvious if I unfriend him. But at the same time I’ve had this crush on him for close to a decade and really need to move on with my life rather than waiting to see if he’s ever single again from his on-off relationship.
But I have no idea how to do it while not making him think he’s done something to annoy me. He’s a really nice guy and I don’t want to hurt him at all since he’s already going through a lot of bad stuff and I care about him (despite not being able to be with him myself). I don’t want to part on bad terms. I’m also debating whether to just be honest and say I’m unfriending him due to this crush, so it leaves the door open if he’s ever single again and wants to get in touch. I have no idea.
I’ll still be friends with everyone else we know, so it will be obvious it’s just him I’ve removed. I’ll also still see when mutual friends interact with him plus all his public content. So it won’t cut off all contact, which makes me question whether I should even bother. I’ve cut off all contact for over a year in the past and it made no difference. I don’t think I’ll ever get over him, so I need to do something as my life is basically on hold. It’s driving me mad! : (