Purging My Facebook “Friends”

For a very long time I held out and kept my Facebook friend list exclusive. Only the people I actually knew or had met in the real world made the cut. Not long ago I decided to take the plunge and expand that list to like-minded people, mostly borrowing from my sizable Roaring Republican Twitter following.

I LOVE the openness of Twitter. There doesn’t need to be a pretext for a follow. You  use the service knowing everything you say and do is public unless you have one of those rare private locked down accounts. Even then, private doesn’t always mean personal, so there is not a built-in expectation that following a private account means you have some kind of deep relationship with the person behind it. It also, as of this writing, doesn’t open you up to an endless stream of Facebook-style requests to do things. If someone gets too trigger happy with @Mentions or DM’s you can just block them and they go away.

Facebook used to be different, it was at one time a walled and closed system. Early on you could only get in with a university e-mail address. Even after it became open to the public, there was a reasonable expectation of privacy that came with the term “friend” because the act of connecting with a friend meant you trusted them and Facebook kept the walls up. Over the last few years things have changed and Facebook started knocking those walls down.

I had added several hundred new “friends”. Facebook’s suggestion engine, while not perfect, was good at finding people who had the same interests and political worldview as I did and I used the list feature to keep them in one place. The immediate problem? I suddenly became swamped with requests. Requests from new friends, requests to play games, requests to attend events, requests to “Like” things, requests that made the requests feature in general unusable. A half hour of my day was spent hiding things or skimming and denying long lists of requests I did not want in order to find the few from family or friends I did.

Facebook became absolutely unusable and I did, in fact, stop using it.

Then Facebook reintroduced Groups as a new feature for users to create areas for people to connect such like-minded individuals on their lists. The idea, seemingly, coworkers could create them to talk about their jobs or couples to share information about an upcoming wedding. A nice idea, sure, but it came with a massive problem. You didn’t accept requests to be in a group but were simply added to them by friends! Even worse, other members of the group could add whomever they wanted to that group, “The worst spam loophole in the world” is what one blogger called it.

Facebook’s response to the Groups problem?

A Facebook spokeswoman confirmed that group members can only add their friends to the group. “If you have a friend that is adding you to groups you do not want to belong to, or they are behaving in a way that bothers you, you can tell them to stop doing it, block them or remove them as a friend – and they will no longer ever have the ability to add you to any group,” she wrote in an e-mail. “If you don’t trust someone to look out for you when making these types of decisions on the site, we’d suggest that you shouldn’t be friends on Facebook.”

Groups alone were one thing but I could see where it was going. So I decided that if Facebook was going to remain usable, I was going to have to get on board and tell everyone else to leave the bus. I deleted from my account every person I did not personally know or haven’t personally met. A few exceptions remain for friends I have made online that I am still interested in knowing and feel I can trust. I did not only stop there, I deleted several people from high school and college I honestly felt I have no desire to interact with now or would in the future. Then I started un-Liking things too. I figured, why not clean the entire house?

The result has been great. The service has become usable again. The endless stream of requests have stopped. Now I find myself only having to deal with them from people I actually know. Still annoying but less so.