Facebook Doesn’t Want You To Know Who Unfriends You. Do You? | Hacker News Reader

Facebook Doesn’t Want You To Know Who Unfriends You. Do You?

socialfixer.com

40 pointsNimi42 comments

> 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.

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.

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.

Learning to handle rejection on both sides is a life skill. Are people that bad at handling this now?

I have no idea. There was a lot of outcry, much like this, borne out of a desire to deceive, when FB started showing people when you've seen their messages on chat.

I'm serious. Every single criticism about why that feature (and this one too, by the looks of it) is terrible is rooted in the desire to mislead someone. Whether that be about friend status or whether you read their messages.

I'd say that it isn't to mislead someone, but to allay their feelings. It's out of kindness and not malice that's for sure.

I like this comment, I think it explains why it's not as simple as being honest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624928

This explains it in more general terms:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-son3EJTrU

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.

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.

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.

Agreed. Facebook also treats the "Friendship" status as meaning, more or less, "I'm really interested in what this person has to say about everything." And that's not always the case. I've removed people simply because I was tired of seeing pictures of their kids on my News Feed or people arguing back and forth about marijuana legalization legislation. It doesn't mean I don't consider them to be my friend.

I know there's a whole set of settings one can go through to limit the content you see from certain people, etc. etc. but that's also another huge problem with Facebook in general. They take it upon themselves to decide for you which friends are more deserving of your attention. 90% of the time, it's never right. I consider myself a pretty tech savy guy and even I couldn't be bothered trying to understand how to do something like that. It's easier, for a lot of people, to just remove someone from their daily news feed.

I used Social Fixer for this feature alone. I used it because the way I use Facebook (and everyone uses Facebook differently) is to keep in touch with old friends, the friends that moved, got married, graduated. I feel deceptively connected to these people even though I'm not because I have a way to sort of keep tabs without having to keep tabs on them. When they stop appearing in my news feed, they traverse into that vague friend/not-friend category and I'm left wondering what Tom has been up to all these years. Social Fixer usually would let me know that Tom has actually deleted his Facebook account and that's why he has appeared to vanish from my digital life. Sometimes it told me that Jane has unfriended me and I was left assuming Jane got tired of all the gifs I was posting.

I broadcast my yearly culling of cell and social contacts as a way of simplifying my life and distractions.

The ones who were worth keeping responded in some form or fashion z:)

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.

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

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)

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

how about it. Well, we haven't.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Defriend, or tell them! But fair points overall.

I built a site that should help make unfriending people a bit more fun http://www.dddefriended.com

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

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

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.

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

they start hiding the news of the friend u don't interact with.

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.

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

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.

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.

Nothing good can come out of knowing who unfriends you.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com