Facebook : My Recent Experience

 

Here’s a little story of what has happened to me recently on Facebook.

First a little history lesson. For a long time I had an extremely small list of friends on Facebook. I would only accept friend requests from people I really knew, like IRL friends and a few work colleagues. That was it. No Oracle people were allowed… The wife has a rule that only people she would let stay in her house are friends on Facebook. Nobody is allowed in my house, so my definition had to be a little different than that.

Some time ago I changed my stance on Facebook friends and started to accept other people, mostly assigning them to the “Restricted” list, and so it went on for some time.

Recently I tweeted that I was getting a lot of friend requests and wondered what was going on. I figured I have a lot of readers, so it’s natural people would reach out, and I didn’t think to much about it. After a while I started to get some really odd things happen, so I did a little digging and found some rather “interesting” people in my friend list. I don’t really want to say more about it than that.

The long and short of it was I decided to remove several thousand friends and I’ve returned to something close to my original policy. I’m sorry if you are a decent person and feel offended that I have unfriended you, but if I don’t really know you, that’s the way it is.

By the way, Facebook used to let you mass delete friends, but that is no longer possible. What’s more, if you delete a lot of them at once they lock certain features of your account. I had to write to Facebook to explain what I was doing and why before they would let me unfriend people again. I know it’s an automatic check for suspicious behaviour, but it would be nice if they spent more effort checking what people are saying and doing on their platform…

Cheers

Tim…

Author: Tim...

DBA, Developer, Author, Trainer.

5 thoughts on “Facebook : My Recent Experience”

  1. Tim,
    You should go the extra mile and remove your FB account. Then instruct your firewall to block every Facebook site.
    I did that one year ago, and have no regrets.

  2. Tim,

    I joined FB and Twitter back in ’06 and stopped the use of them back then right away after a few weeks due to time wastage. Deleted the accounts a few years later aufter not using them at all.

    No regrets at all for me, too.

    Best Regards,
    Christian

  3. Fully agree – I see the same pattern when you accept “everybody” and assign people to a designated list. And FB does little to nothing to prevent that. Which I understand as their primary goal is “making as much money as possible for Mark Z and the stockholders no matter how”. It’s us having this weird thinking, that something could be for free and nice at the same time.

    Cheers,
    Mike

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