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…