The ethics of unfriending

Some more musings on Facebook, this time the ethics of unfriending and when it is acceptable to remove someone from your friend list, an action that can easily cause offence and awkwardness if not handled properly. I have recently been suffering fairly regular unfriendings by people I considered good friends and over the past few months have seen my friend count steadily decrease. Of course, a user is perfectly within their rights to control their friend list and unfriend anyone at any time, but these unfriendings often come completely out of the blue so why they have chosen to unfriend me is something I struggle to understand. Personally I consider unfriending someone to actually be quite rude and something only to be done with very good reason as there are plenty of alternatives.

Facebook's secret feature change

I'm sure many of you will agree that a lot of the changes Facebook make don't improve the user experience at all, and I have been very critical of them, but for once they have actually made a beneficial change that is genuinely useful and solves a real issue. However, they seem to have neglected to tell anyone about it as the majority of users haven't realised anything has changed and the problematic behaviour it was supposed to prevent is still occurring so I feel more attention needs to be drawn to this change. It affects what happens when you reject a friend request: that person now no longer has the ability to send you another request so you won't be bombarded by those annoying persistent users who keep sending a new request every time you reject one, and this should have put an end to that irritating practice of friend requests being left pending indefinitely.

Further Facebook friend frustration

Following up on a previous post written a few months ago, I have started to notice a new form of irritating behaviour becoming increasingly common on Facebook recently. Many friend requests are never being accepted or rejected by the recipient and are simply being left pending indefinitely, and in some cases this appears to be deliberate and intentional. It only takes a second to click the 'Accept' or 'Not now' buttons so at first I thought this was simply laziness, and to some extent it probably is but I've started to realise Facebook themselves may also be partly responsible.

To support my argument I have been regularly monitoring someone I sent a request to and have confirmed that she has accepted friend requests from other people since receiving mine that is still pending, and thus has definitely been online and seen my request. I find that extremely annoying: when accepting those requests there is no good reason why she couldn't have dealt with mine at the same time, so I just don't understand why it has been ignored and others accepted. Please people, if you don't want to be friends with someone, at least make the effort to let them know by rejecting their request and don't just leave them in suspense forever.

Facebook friend frustration

I hope I'm not alone in my feelings towards Facebook friends - the sense of satisfaction when a friend request is accepted but also, more pertinently to this post, that feeling of disappointment and self-doubt when you realise a request you were confident would be accepted has been either rejected or worse still simply ignored and left hanging as a pending request. These feelings are even worse when you see these same people becoming friends with many of your friends and making you feel left out.

Are Facebook missing a trick?

A tech-related post this time - there's no vehicular content here. What started out as an idle 'I wish they would do that' thought developed into a realisation that Facebook may be missing out on a vast untapped stream of data, which given their insatiable appetite for knowing everything about everyone surprises me.

What happens when a friend request is rejected or declined? In short, nothing - the requester is not notified and the request is even removed from their activity log leaving no evidence that it ever happened, which inevitably causes confusion as they think maybe they didn't send the request after all and send it again so the other person gets annoyed by having to reject it again. Anyway, that's not really my point. I don't know about others but I only send friend requests to people I have actually met and I think have a high likelihood of accepting. The majority do but on the odd occasions when someone decides not to I would quite like to receive some feedback on why they did so - is it because they don't like the content of my profile, they just don't feel they know me well enough, or something else? If I don't know what's wrong, there's nothing I can do that might make them more likely to accept, but it feels quite rude messaging someone who has just rejected my friend request asking why they did it.

Having thought about this from a purely personal point of view, I then realised that collecting this information would surely give Facebook themselves a massively valuable insight into the psychology of their users and the type of people they might want to be friends with. As a simple example, let's say person X tends to reject requests from users with certain characteristics because he doesn't like the content of their timelines, but accepts requests from users with other characteristics. Knowing this would allow Facebook to provide much better focusing in person X's 'people you may know' list with a consequently greater chance that he will become friends with them and Facebook can do their 'your friends like this so you might too' marketing wizardry. Maybe they could even use this information to help build up statistical data on the probability of any given friend request being rejected and the likely reason why!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't something like this exist a few years ago? After declining a friend request I'm sure you had to select an option, which I think may have been along the lines of 'do you know this person?' and selecting 'no' may have had certain consequences for the requester. Like so many Facebook features, this quietly disappeared just as suddenly as it appeared with no explanation, but expanding it into a list of reasons for declining would have provided useful feedback, both for the requester and more importantly for Facebook themselves.

Any thoughts, or is it just me who wants to know why my friend requests get rejected?