Missing the point

[Big Red]

I was looking at the suggested friends section on my Facebook earlier and saw someone I knew, although it didn't list us as having any mutual friends. I clicked on her profile and sure enough it was who I thought it was. I don't know how they determined to suggest her to me as we don't really have anything in common. The really strange part about it was that she has no friends. I'm not taking a swipe against her personally; she has absolutely no Facebook friends. While this may not sound particularly odd, it truly is once you realize she has a fairly active, vibrant Facebook page. She posts lots of pictures and status updates. I don't know why, though, since nobody will ever see them. Sure, if they do a search on her and find her profile they can see her pics and everything she's been up to over the last couple years since opening her account, but none of her comments, pictures, cutesy memes or angry rants about the news stories she posts will ever show up in their news feeds. I considered sending her a friend request but thought better of it since that would mean that all of her comments, pictures, cutesy memes and angry rants about the news stories she posts will show up in my news feed.

[Qui-Gon Jim]

Could be that her friends list is suppressed, only viewable to friends. FB security is a very complicated web.

[Big Red]

That could be, but I know a few people she knows, including her kids, and none of them have her on their friends lists. Looking at her profile, nothing else seems restricted, including all her personal information, so she doesn't seem to have a good grasp of FB security. Her wall is a two-year long, one-sided conversation. No responses, no replies, no likes, nothing. I checked her kids' pages as well (my wife is FB friends with one of them) and neither of them have her listed or have any replies, posts or likes from her. Reading over her page, she certainly espouses as though she has a grand audience. It would be amusing if it wasn't so creepy.

I know a few others who either don't get the point of Facebook or refuse to use it in the way it was intended. I have two family members who despise FB with a passion because of how horribly other family members treat some of the rest of the family on there. Instead of closing their accounts or deleting those family members (or at least blocking them), they keep their accounts open, only communicate via private message in order to make it look as though they're inactive and don't do that "Facebook thing," and then get all worked up every time they see the nasty treatment being doled out by the idiots. I gave up on trying to convince them to close their accounts or quit checking them. My son thinks the whole point of Facebook is to delete every last bit of activity on his account. If anyone posts on his wall, he deletes it. He'll like other people's posts and make comments on them, but then immediately dislikes it and deletes his comment and the post from his wall. He's constantly unfriending and refriending people and never lets his friend list get above 20. Like a couple other family members, he populated his personal information with false and misleading information (to make it harder for "them" to get any info about him), but he has his profile as locked down as possible so it doesn't really matter anyway. I asked him why he deletes everything on his page and he said it's so "they" won't be able to use anything against him. I tried to explain the pointlessness of his comment-then-delete activity, but he said that his friends will still get notifications in their tickers so they'll see everything he posts, all while he leaves himself safely anonymous from whoever "they" are. I'm considering getting him an aluminum-lined ball cap for Christmas.

And if you think those folks are wacky, I have one friend who never complains on Facebook, never posts song lyrics, makes comments addressed to the various days of the week and seasons of the year as though they're actual people, posts cutesy memes or makes vague, attention-pandering or passive-aggressive posts then refuses to follow them up with any sort of explanation. He doesn't get the point of Facebook at all.

[Jodo]

I'm sure some of the other GH'ers that I have on FB can all agree....I'm addicted to FB in all ways, shapes, and forms. I actually have it open in another tab right now, just in case I get any notifications. XD

I hear what you're saying though, some people just don't get it. One aspect of people posting that drives me nuts, is the fact that people "sign" their comments. I know a girl who will comment, and at the bottom put something along the lines of this "Elaina Renea Smith - Forever Here, and dreaming of blah blah blah". I can't stand when people do this for some reason. I can see who is posting the comment, your bloody name is right next to it! >< And likewise, a good amount of people will comment on my stuff, refer to me by name, but spell my name wrong. It's right there, literally, right where you just typed your comment! ><

[Big Red]

Something that drives me nuts are the people who like their own statuses, pictures, etc. The fact that you typed it out or posted it kind of indicates to everyone already that you like it; no need to give yourself the thumbs up.

The other day a friend of mine posted about how she can't stand people who only post positive things on there, especially about their kids and family. I told her that I don't like writing a lot of negative things on Facebook; that's what those 8364 or so meticulously printed and chronologically ordered notebooks in my basement are for. I thought it was hilarious but it didn't go over well with her friends. Amusingly, most of the ones who were bothered by it are former high school classmates, so I may not be invited to the next reunion.

I may have mentioned this before, but another thing I don't like on there are the creepy guys who go through and like all the pictures of their friends' teenage daughters. I have a few people I may have to unfriend in a year or two when my girls get a little older. At the same time, I've noticed that a lot of my friends' kids are getting older and posting more and more inappropriate stuff. I've mentioned this to a couple of my friends to varying degrees of receptiveness. One guy accused me of being one of those creepy, stalker type guys. Another was upset but glad I told her, and another was just glad I spoke up.

I'd say that I don't like the train wrecks that ensue when people break up and/or air their dirty laundry on Facebook, but like any train wreck it can be pretty fascinating and hard to turn away from. For the longest time it was just my wife's friends who did stuff like this, but a few of mine have given hers a run for their money as of late. One guy, after doing something extremely stupid which nearly ended his marriage (he never said what), figured the best way to win back his wife would be to share all his own personal demons and failures as a husband and father with all his friends on Facebook, including going into details about the affairs he had early in their marriage. To her credit, the wife stayed quiet while he progressively made more and more of an ass of himself. They managed to patch things up, but while it was going on it was much more enjoyable than Maury.

[Big Red]

I had another FB friend who just didn't get it the other day. She was wishing her parents a 50th wedding anniversary. It started out nice enough, but then she pointed out how unrealistic it was to expect anyone to stay together that long anymore. This was followed by her lamenting the fact that her three ex-husbands didn't understand the concept, then turned into some general, all around man-hating venom. Facebook--when you care enough to turn someone's special day into your own, self-pitying crap-fest.

[Jodo]

I hate when people do that. ><

My only recent "problem" is a dude who keeps messaging me to tell me how cool I am (which I'm not against), but then he also asked me if I had any shirtless pictures I could send him. LOL. I thought something like that might be coming, but he was really blatant about it, which made me get a good chuckle out of it all. XD

[Big Red]

Early on I had an old acquaintance get too friendly on Facebook. I suggested she was crossing the line which made it get worse, so I deleted her. It was a good deal worse with my wife, though. When she first got her account she went through and added everyone she found from her high school class. This one guy had been quite fond of her back in high school, and he didn't see the fact that they were both married now as an impediment to him letting her know he still felt the same way. At the time, the games where you sent virtual gifts to people were really big--stuff like drinks, shamrocks around St. Patrick's day, etc. He started sending her drinks with really suggestive names, such as Sex on the Beach and a few others that probably shouldn't be mentioned here. I told my wife she should delete him, but she was worried that it would really upset some other friends so she just started blocking some of those games. He then started playing the big boobs game, where instead of drinks you'd send people pictures of big boobs. Not to brag on my wife, but certain of her assets have always been quite notable. She usually stayed logged in on the family PC at the time and one day when I turned it on I saw she had several dozen big boob requests sent to her by this guy. One of them had a message attached along the lines that he'd like her to send back a picture of the real thing. I was about to just delete him when he suddenly sent her a chat message (she usually wasn't logged into to chat but I'd turned it on to try to get hold of a mutual friend). Assuming I was her, he started hitting on me immediately. I played along for a few minutes just to make sure there was no denying what he was doing. Most of what I replied was along the lines of "really?" and "oh, yeah?", although I did ask whether he was married, which he said wasn't a big deal because there were ways to make sure she'd never find out. I finally told him he was talking to me and not my wife. I said I was going to save the chat and send it to his wife and that if ever tried to contact my wife again, I'd beat the crap out of him. I blocked him from my wife's account right after. I saved the chat and showed her but never sent it to his wife.

As luck would have it, a year or two later one of my wife's old friend's marriage ended in divorce because she'd been cheating on her husband. The guy she'd been cheating with dumped her because he figured anyone who'd cheat on her husband then file for divorce wasn't worth staying with. Shortly after that, she started dating the guy who'd been hitting on my wife. He was fresh off his divorce after his wife found out about the numerous women he'd had on the side. The friend and the guy both started talking about how the other was their soul mate, and how they'd be getting married and that it was going to be forever. My wife and several other mutual friends told the friend to watch her step because he was a sleazy, cheating idiot. She, of course, told them all to go to hell because they didn't know him like she did, and those stories about him cheating were all made up by his ex-wife. About six months later she dumped him because she found out he'd been cheating on her, not only with several of the women he'd been seeing when he was married, but with a few of her friends as well (and for the record, the guy is a bald, sleazy-looking, out of shape loser--how he manages to hook up with this many women is beyond me). While several of her friends said, "I told you so," (including one of the friends who'd been cheating with him), my wife didn't say anything. I haven't checked out my wife's page in a while, but that friend was a fun train wreck to watch for a while after that as she bounced around from one "forever" relationship to another, each one ending when her or her new soul mate cheated.

[figureaddict]

I will say again, this is why I am not on facebook.
Jodo, find the most horrendously ugly shirtless dude's picture on the net and post that for the guy. Or better yet, use that creative makeup skill of yours and make yourself up that way and post a photo of that. Some dumb buck-toothed deliverance hillbilly persona or something.

[Big Red]

I have a cousin who decided to block me from receiving most of his status updates on Facebook. I don't know if it's retaliation for the cousins I decided to block or them suggesting/intimidating him into it, but like the other one who decided to do the same a year or so ago, he forgot to block my wife, which made it clear that he'd blocked me. The only thing is, he has various business and artistic endeavors that he posts about and he makes sure I get all those posts. Most of them are begging for support in some form or another, so he doesn't mind pandering for my time and/or money; he just doesn't want to let me see what he's up to in his personal life.

A while after I noticed this was going on, another family member asked me if I'd seen his latest post begging for votes on some website for something he was working on. I told her I saw it but I hadn't bothered to vote. Shocked, she asked me why. I said it was because I won't support someone who excludes me from all other aspects of his life, yet still expects me to support him when he begs for it. She was aghast and called me a liar, saying this cousin would never do such a thing. I grabbed her spare laptop and pulled up my Facebook next to hers and showed her. This cousin is pretty active on Facebook so it didn't take much to show that he was absolutely blocking me from getting anything other than his begging posts. She still thought I should support him since he's family, and I told he she was free to think whatever she wanted.

A few days later I got a message from another family member wanting to know why I wasn't supporting him. I explained the situation and said that he was free to play the same petty games as the others, but I didn't want a part of it. She blamed the whole thing on me, of course, and told me that he really relies on the family for support so I should just get over myself and go back to supporting him. I didn't respond after that, but I'm guessing she said something to him because now, a day or two before he does his begging, he'll unblock me for a status or two, then send the begging request, then re-block me again. I've decided to just quit responding to any questions about whether I voted for him or bought whatever he's selling.