
Facebook Doesn’t Want You To Know Who Unfriends You. Do You? - Nimi
http://socialfixer.com/blog/2013/10/27/facebook-doesnt-want-you-to-know-who-unfriends-you-do-you/
======
canttestthis
> Sometimes it’s an accident, and they want to ask the person if they meant to
> unfriend them

This is just a recipe for disaster. If I unfriended someone and they messaged
me asking for clarification, I'd just tell them I messed up so I wouldn't have
to deal with the awkwardness. Heck, I'd stop unfriending people and just put
them into a group that I exclude from all future status updates, etc. I'm not
surprised Facebook shuts these apps down. In fact, I support them.

~~~
abhididdigi
Exactly, It happened to me. It was so awkward that I had to send her a
screenshot that I by mistake un-friend-ed her, thinking it was her old
account(actually I know it was her current account).

Facebook has the right reason shutting down these apps.

~~~
shorttime
Why is it awkward? Just tell them you've moved on with the relationship,
whatever kind it was prior.

Why are people so afraid of the truth? Why do we always tip-toe around things
like this - it's not like you purposely tried to make her have negative
feelings.

~~~
jowiar
Because the real world isn't like that.

Facebook treats friendship as something binary. You're friends or you're not.
Friendships don't work that way, though. You don't usually wake up and
suddenly become "not friends" with someone. You drift apart one minute at a
time. Maybe someone moves, gets married, has kids. Someone else moves. Someone
gets divorced, switches jobs, goes to graduate school on the other side of the
world. By the end of all this, someone who you once spent time with every day
is not really a part of your life anymore, but you can't really point to a
moment when "it" happened.

~~~
xxchan
And at one point this relationship is better described as "not friends" rather
than "friends". It's typically mutual so I don't see a problem here.

~~~
afterburner
It's typically not exactly mutual, that's the whole problem. Persons A and B
may drift apart, but maybe B thinks they're drifting apart slower than A
think. Friendship goes in both directions, with different values in each
direction, not identical ones.

------
advisedwang
This article only considered the point of view of the person being unfriended.
There are very good reasons to keep unfriending secret on the side of the
unfriend-er.

Lack of secrecy will make people less willing to unfriend because of social
embarrassment or other reasons. This is a bad thing as people will end up
leaking personal info because of awkwardness.

Imagine an old school friend is stalking you. Conventional advice is not to
interact with a stalker but to ignore them. Unfriending makes sense but if
does/could send a message to the stalker could make a situation worse.

~~~
aianus
Wouldn't the stalker immediately notice they were no longer facebook friends
regardless of whether or not he got a notification?

------
Sektor
Just a quick note to say that i've found a workaround for this a long time ago
- all you need to do is somehow import your facebook 'friends' list into your
phone's contact book (i did it on android but i'm sure it's possible on IOS
somehow) then when you open the app in the 'find friends' area it's going to
suggest any contacts you have that aren't currently your friend on facebook.
so anyone listed there has 'unfriended' you since the export. I'm sure it
would be trivial for them to close that hole but it's also unlikely because
they would want people adding as many real-life friends to their facebook
friend list as possible. they have however actively gone after the methods by
which you can export the current friend list and import it to the phone (it's
in their best interest for this migration to be one-way of course) I think
when I did it i used yahoo contacts but that one was 'closed' (sort of,
there's still ways)

------
ufmace
Sounds terrible, and I'm glad that Facebook tries to stop people from doing
it. I'll admit to being mildly curious about who might be unfriending me, but
I'll gladly stay ignorant on that to avoid having other people notice that I
unfriended them and potentially have to deal with questions about why I
unfriended them from people I don't care about in the first place. I already
barely post anything on facebook at least partly because I don't feel like
considering how all of the people who might see it will react to it, and even
less feel like spending time on segregating my friends list into groups with
special permissions and filtering everything I do and everyone I add based on
those groups.

------
smtddr
It's always interesting(read: painful) to see HN comments on articles that
relate more to emotion than cold-hard-logic.

Humans are Humans, not machines that obey a specific instruction-set with no
particular affinity. There _is_ an awkwardness to removing/rejecting people
from your social circles. Simple examples are teens who don't want their
parents connected to their Facebook. Not because the teen is evil, it's just
that there's a certain "image" a teen might have for his friends that his
parents don't see. That doesn't make the teen bad. I hope everyone here can
relate and know of at least one thing that you knew wasn't the-end-of-the-
world but you'd just rather not have your family know about(yet). I personally
have been asked to connect on LinkedIn to people that I'd rather not be
connected to. Call me thin-skinned if you want, I don't like trying to explain
to a co-worker why I refuse to add him/her to my LinkedIn profile so instead I
just do it and remove them a few weeks later in hopes they never notice. I was
caught once( _that I know of_ ), and I just acted like _" Whoa, I don't know
what happened!"_ ...but the damage was done. It's the same thing like, when a
co-worker comes to your desk and asked "Did you get that email I sent?", so
they're standing there while you hunt through your inbox.... but you know the
email is in the spam folder because this particular co-worker sends _way too
many emails with no action-items_ and you don't want the coworker to see all
of her/his emails unread and piled up in a folder named "SPAM", so you just
click around aimlessly while trying to think of a good way to get out of the
situation. Rejection is hard. Yes, people should learn to deal with it - but
the reality is, it's an emotion and non-logical things happen depending on the
people involved.

Hmm.... maybe I should rename my spam folder to "SuperImportant".

Oh, this reminds me of an _awesome_ story when a job-applicant submitted their
resume and multi-page job-application paper to a school. Another employee took
the filled out resume and gave it to the manager. The manager looked at it,
saw "GED" in the education section and ripped up the application saying "I
don't deal with GED people anymore". Not even a minute later, the job-
applicant walked back in and said "Oh, I've just moved and put the wrong
address. Can I get my application back to change it?". The look of horror the
employee saw on the manager's face....

___

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what
you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

― Maya Angelou

------
011011100
How about we just grow some thicker skin. Social embarrassment? Man, what a
hurdle.

~~~
rfnslyr
Rejection in a different medium doesn't change the fact it's still rejection.

~~~
shorttime
Learn to experience rejection and move on. You're going to experience it
whether you like or not so it's best to figure out how to deal with it.

~~~
lkbm
It's very en vogue for young, analytical types to pretend we're hyper-rational
and insist we should all act according to that assumption, but the reality is
that none of us are hyper-rational, much as we like to imagine ourselves that
way. THe way to deal with our limited rationality is not to say "well, you
should start being hyper-rational" and organize our environment as if that
will work. It's to acknowledge your limitations and organize your environment
in ways that accommodates your limited rationality.

------
jmspring
I have a mix of "friends" on Facebook, mostly I have met them in person or
know them through assorted activities where we've maybe crossed paths but not
met formally. Occasionally, I go through and prune / reorganize the list if
the mood hits me. There have been times I've dropped 30-50 people just because
I was going more personal w/ updates.

That said, the most "amusing" defending I noticed solely on a lack of status
updates was over a religious debate. I shared something that apparently struck
a chord around a particular holiday, yet it was a meme in current popular
culture. When I noticed the unfriending, I just rolled my eyes and went with
it.

Sometimes things just don't mesh even when you've known someone for years (as
was this particular case). Online day to day antics are no replacement for in
person relationships.

------
argonaut
Unfriending is often _very_ awkward. I once found out I was unfriended by
someone I had lunch with (along with his coworkers) only about a month prior
(a friendly lunch they invited me to). It's not the rejection that bothers me,
it's the sheer surprise/shock that makes it uncomfortable.

------
hobs
I dont understand why everyone feels obligated to let people into their lives
who have little to no meaning, and is embarrassed by being honest and removing
them.

If you didnt lead the person on, why not say something like "Hey, I really
reserve that for personal friends and family." If they seem a put off, invite
them over for dinner sometime, you may find that the irl interaction gets you
a need friend, and if they dont accept, then you get exactly what you were
looking for.

~~~
megablast
Life is never cut and dry. You make friends, you lose touch, you have new
friends.

You may even have a friend who just comments way too much, and it becomes
annoying.

~~~
hobs
Defriend, or tell them! But fair points overall.

------
kevando
I built a site that should help make unfriending people a bit more fun
[http://www.dddefriended.com](http://www.dddefriended.com)

~~~
mortuus
This is great, here's hoping it spreads like wildfire on facebook!

~~~
kevando
Thanks! Let me know if you have any ideas to make it better or easier to
share. I spent most of the time on the audio track

------
CamperBob2
Sounds like the right solution would be for Facebook to lower the social
weight attached to the "friend" bit. They could turn it into a scalar quantity
that's boosted when you interact with your "friend" in some fashion, and that
otherwise decays over time. When it reaches zero, the unfriending process
happens silently and automatically.

That way, if you don't visit your "friend"'s page in x days, they are no
longer your "friend." You can always restore the connection later by visiting
the person's page -- and of course Facebook would continue to track the link
forever as part of their attempt to run their own private NSA or whatever they
do with their graph data -- but from the users' point of view, the act of
unfriending would become an inoffensive, passive one that no one can be blamed
for.

~~~
nitrogen
It seems like they kind of do this already with the news feed.

------
mathattack
I don't unfriend often. I think the only time was when someone was doing hate
speech. I generally just block comments from folks who get too crazy
political.

All this said, I would think that writing a program for oneself to do this
would be trivial, no? It's just comparing a list of your own friends to itself
every day. I haven't programmed any Facebook apps, but this seems too simple
to be believed.

------
awhitty
It scares me that Facebook can completely block a link to something they don't
like by calling it "malicious".

~~~
awhitty
Hey guys, I'd like to clarify what I mean since I think you're missing the
point of what I'm getting at (though I'm sure only a handful of people will
make it this far down on a dying thread -- congrats if you did?).

This is the quote I'm referring to:

> "Your web site may be marked as malicious, so anyone trying to post a link
> to your tool will not be able to do so on Facebook."

As one of the largest websites on the Internet where unfathomably massive
amounts of communication takes place, Facebook is in a really unique position.
Its user base spans continents, countries, governments, etc., and it's been
said before that sites like Google and Facebook have more power than any
single government because they have the ability to shape how their users think
(no dislike button, for example -- a very blatant design decision), and they
are, ultimately, the arbiters of what is said on their network. So when I read
that quote, it scared me a bit because the thought of Facebook deeming a link
"malicious" because it doesn't like it makes me consider how Facebook could
wield this.

Social Fixer clearly isn't a malicious piece of code. Has anyone gotten a
virus from it? Did it do something blatantly against the will or desires of
its users? Did it mean to do harm? I can't imagine so. So when Facebook calls
the tool "malicious," Facebook is really stretching that classification here.
Isn't that a little concerning?

This illustrates how blindly we trust Facebook to get these things right. We
assume they're being honest about what's malicious and it's typically a
positive experience for us users: "Oh! That link was going to give me a virus?
Thanks so much for protecting me Facebook!" And we'd never give the link a
second thought. It's as good as gone for a big population of the Internet.

So here we are, trusting a publicly traded company (who sells a chance to
touch our impressionable brains to anyone who'll pay a dollar) to get
censorship right -- to have our same values and ideals and to be responsible
with its unique position as a communication gateway.

And I'm not saying I don't trust Facebook -- I bet they're probably doing a
good job about censorship. But this is really something we should spend more
time talking about. I mean, the US government gets in a pickle about
censorship probably every day, and it's run by people we elect! Who knows
what's going on with a private entity like Facebook.

I hope this clears things up because I really think this is an issue you guys
should take seriously, even if it might sound a little trite at this point.

------
judk
Facebook could and should fix this by just make 'unfriending' a move to a
'List' that isn't part of the regular 'Friends' sharing list, and clarifying
the semantics of 'Friended' to mean 'invited to Friend once in the past' not
an ongoing reaffirmation of Friendship.

------
danneu
Nothing good can come out of knowing who unfriends you.

I guarantee it will just make you feel a little worse about yourself.

------
lifeformed
It should be the unfriender who has priority - no one should be explicitly
told when you unfriend them.

------
pirateking
Who cares. There are more important things to care about than who is in your
friend graph. Like the fact that you have a friend graph.

I would rather have Web Rings back than join Facebook.

------
ethanazir
A FB type service needs to be more egalitarian; regulated; etc. Its almost
like the cable company, water company, power company;

------
mkmkmmmmm
I don't give a fuck about who unfriends me to the extent that I deleted my
account. If they wish to be a walled garden I'd recommend others do the same.

