"Can I say you're my girlfriend on Facebook?"

i actually pretty much automatically delete friends who do that shit.

the only thing i've ever campaigned for is the petition to get the NPG/Smithsonian to put up the motherfucking Wojnarowicz piece in that exhibit again. and i've been on facebook for more than five years— that's the first.

Deleting friends. There's another one. You remove someone because (a) they're distantly related and you're not sure why they're on your list in the first place, (b) they're a massive bigot, (c) they're a person you met on ilx or something and you don't need them to be on full-name terms with you and your entire networks of friends/family or (c) you just don't like them, and three weeks later you get a call from a friend/relative saying 'oh hai, so-and-so has got the shits with you because you blocked them in Facebook.' Puh-leeze.

I don't want to derail this thread into a bitching session but I've been off it for probably close to a year and I don't even notice its absence.

I might sign up for a "Deactivate your FB account for a week to send a message that e-mail activism is NOT OK, but actually quite stupid"

I've removed people-I-barely-knew from FB and 12 months later they've re-added me? Like they forgot or something (I dont re-accept). I've had one "omg why did you defriend me!?" complaint from a lass who once in the very distant past I was passing friends with via an IRC channel, but I just dont want anything to do with that lot, so... no.

luckily, most people don't notice. i also have started blocking peoples' feeds, cuz man, some of my old friends are negative negative nancies. like this old friend, who wrote this a few weeks ago:

"I got my wish. We got an hour off early, so I didn't have to drive home in rush hour traffic for 90 minutes like I usually do on Mondays, and I got to take a nap, after a very stressful day of having to do stupid crap like running to the Greek restaurant in a torrential downpour for everyone else's food because my boss wants me to "get to know the area."

it's like, great, your day sucked, LEARN TO FUCKING DEAL YOU WHINER

so yeah, blocked.

That was weird. All those people signing up to 'I WIL DELETE MY FAECBOOK ACOUNT COZ I CARE BAOUT MY PRIVACY' groups that went absolutely nowhere.

"The drunken step-father saw that his co-worker's new profile picture was a Carebear, and then it dawned on him: childhood is a time for laughter and innocence, after all, and that by berating and smacking his wife's son for getting sweet and sour sauce on the new carpet, well, maybe that was an overreaction."

so tempted to do a burt_stanton-style "freakout" status update just listing off all of the stuff we were supposed to "care" about this year

I've removed people-I-barely-knew from FB and 12 months later they've re-added me? Like they forgot or something

I'd been through a lot of weird and scary shit with various people on Facebook but that was the second-last straw.

i've only had one person de-friend then re-friend me, and it was because he'd gone through a massive massive change of life. like, he lost the stick up his ass.

so tempted to do a burt_stanton-style "freakout" status update just listing off all of the stuff we were supposed to "care" about this year

Ok saying you don't care about stuff, or even putting the word care in scare quotes, is the kind of thing that iirc gets at least one Care Bear at your door, imploring you to change your ways. If you are over '80s cartoons, I highly recommend not dissing caring.

unless someone is being a true ass i don't normally knock them off my friends list. got plenty of people on my list whom i don't know too well/haven't seen in years/don't really care for that much, but deleting them seems kind of dickish and message-sending. easy enough just to hide them.

xpost to anyone

(aa here) I had a few people delete their account declaring 'FB is ruining my life' or somesuch and reappear with a friend request two weeks later.

circa1916: If you hide them, they can still see all your stuff, can't they? My main objection was to letting near-strangers see everything about me.

I'm down with cartoons, and I'm down with actual caring; I'm not, however, down with people thinking that posting a picture of a cartoon counts as caring. If you're actually out there spending time trying to make a difference for whatever cause you purport to care about, though, I'm all for it! That's great. (The other type of "caring" I was alluding to consists of stuff like people suddenly "caring" about soccer during the World Cup, when they wouldn't really watch it otherwise. Ditto shit like Harry Potter. Anyway, the moral there is that I should just avoid FB as much as possible during those weeks.)

I just didn't want you to get abducted by Professor Coldheart!

had to Google "Professor Coldheart" tbh *ashamed*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0f130MJjKE

Don't want you to be a victim of this low level of flow.

Adam why do you keep swapping SNs every 10 mins its hurting my brane.

Work v personal due to (a) broken email addr and (b) 77 access. Was supposed to work but seems to be failing thus far, soz.

If you hide them, they can still see all your stuff, can't they? My main objection was to letting near-strangers see everything about me.

nah, you can hide your stuff from people. privacy settings.

looool Abbott

Yeah you can totally filter things quite flexibly on FB posts. I have a default post setting that excludes all family (esp the younguns) from my posts, and a bunch of other filters I could employ if I wanted. And the overall setting is "visible to friends only". Anyone who has their wall set to "everyone can see all my posts" is nuts, because that included people without facebooks.

FB had burnt me enough times with that 'privacy' rubbish. Few people on the planet I trust less than Fart Cockerburg.

zadie thinks there's a generation gap between those who view fbook as a tool (i.e. me and most of you) and those who view it as their honest-to-goodness personality

that doesn't excuse my high school classmates for their various transgressions, of course

Mmmm. It's one application you can use to flesh out your business/personal contacts and play the odd crappy game, but there are FAR too many people who honestly believe it's the centre of their universe and that it maps exactly to the real world in every conceivable way.

Recently one person said to me 'where did you go?' as though removing myself from Facebook quite literally meant I had died/moved to a cave/flown to Mars. Another got married and I didn't know about it, but hey, it's hardly my fault for not using one of the billions of social/location services available.

what the fuck is this new profile shit

there are pictures under people's names now iirc

Yeah the new profile is... weird. I hope it wont force itself on everyone but I suppose it eventually will.

what i read is that you dont need to opt in now if you dont want to but eventually youll get the new layout whether youre into it or not, which is just sorta how these things go

it's nagl, for real

People whining about Facebook changes (I don't mean you lot) is hilarious btw. Usually comes from people who (a) are frightened of change and (b) think they're entitled to make demands despite the whole thing being free.

Oh man, I've missed whining about facebook.

This change is a little more unsettling cos njow it lays out a line of yr photos (instead of one) and neatly says HI THIS PERSONS NAME IS BLAH THEY WERE BORN ON BLAH AND LIVE IN BLAHTOWN in bold right across the pagetop.

It better still damn respect my "dont show my DOB" flag or else fuck a facebook, I'm gone.

lol u old

Trayce, you can still have your birthday set to "Only Me"

you can also set more restrictive stuff on the pictures so they only show up for you, which is how i have things set up

(i.e. my age)

The cartoon thing is funny to me, cos last night I watched an old David Cross routine and he says "Guys, we need to tell everyone about the Aids ribbons. Cos they aren't working!"

What bugs me about the new profile design (especially the info right at the time) is that it seems geared more towards strangers, and not friends, looking at your profile.

Went to college at, lives in, in a relationship with, speaks the following languages et al are stuff for snoops and potential employers, but most of my "friends" don't need to be told that, and those friends that don't know probably wouldn't care to know.

*at the top

yeah it basically looks like a resume of your personal life

I went ahead and deleted all that stuff now. I was fine with it being on my info page, where any friend who wanted to see it could find it, but I def don't want it right up top. Gone.

Also, why did the friends/boxes column get narrower just so the advertising column could get wider? Are we still living in an 800x600 world?

my album of links seems to have disappeared w/the new profile wtf? and i can't seem to get it back? that's where i linked to my work, about the only concession i made to using fbook in a professional sort of way. UGH.

meanwhile the cartoons thing is so tremendously lol. one of my more amazing friends changed her profile picture to the mugshot of baby p's mother, and it was so hilarious to see "10 of your friends have changed their profile picture", and to have that pop up in the middle of all the cartoon characters.

then fb fucking deleted it!!!!

I hate the cartoon picture against child abuse thing, and don't even get me started on the vague status updates about sex or your bra to "raise awareness" about breast cancer, but I do use FB to link to fundraising info for orgs I support or local issues that need some kind of voter input, etc.

I'm afraid of the new profile layout. I really want to get to the point where I delete my FB account, because I'm kind of tired of it, but it's kind of like organized crime or drug addiction. Once you realize how far you're in it, it's almost impossible to get out.

ATTENTION:Thegroup asking everyone to change their profile picture to a cartoon character, is actually a group of Pedophiles. There doing it because kids will accept their friend request faster if they see a cartoon picture. It has nothing to do with any Child charities. IT'S ON ...TONIGHT'S NEWS. Copy & Paste this on to your status, Let everyoneknow

ahahahahahah

Jenny, believe me, it's not that hard. just delete it, set yourself free. think i'm keeping mine over the holidays for whatever event invites might come around then i'm done with this crap.

My biggest concern is the loss of updates from different orgs/groups I like that don't have websites. And I guess I'm still somewhat curious about my high school classmates that are still trickling in (like the guy who just showed up in my "ppl you may know" list with a giant-Wesley Willis-esque headbutt scar on his forehead and a message on his wall from a woman who will never marry him because she refuses to change for him as requested). So conflicted, you guys.

That's the fbookotine kicking in.

Haha nooooo I'm not an addict!

Don't worry, Jenny, there is a Facebook group you can join for people with yr problem.