The Carnal Sins of Facebook

Recently I've been thinking about how the dating process has changed because of the internet. One of the more obvious change that comes to mind is online dating. But I think there's a lot of things that have changed that are easy to overlook. Asking for someone's number isn't common place any more when it's a safer bet to add them onto Facebook after only meeting them once. Even the idea of asking someone out in person or over the phone is becoming much less common over the quick, easy, and less awkward text message or Facebook message.

Is anyone concerned about this trend? I know I am. What's gonna happen in the future when people tell the stories of how they met their wives/husbands and it starts with 'Well I added her on Facebook, and after creeping a few photos, I knew we were perfect for one another'.

Anyway that's another topic for another day. The reason I bring up online interactions is that it got me thinking about Facebook, and more specifically the unwritten rules of Facebook. I thought it was interesting to think that Facebook is one of those safe and easy sites to connect with your friends, but there are certain things you just don't do on there unless you want to alienate everyone. Then it made me think of a list of things people should never do, hence the blog.


Things you can do to get unfriended on Facebook:

1) Liking someone else's status update that reveals bad news: Usually people are more prone to update their statuses with positive things going on in their lives. But every so often there will be some terrible news that they have to share through Facebook, like a relative passing away or losing their job. It should be pretty clear that you should avoid clicking the Like button on these ones, unless you want to lose a friend instantly.

2) Delete someone's comment from your page: I was surprised by this one when I experienced it first hand. I put some kind of status up and the next thing I knew one of my Facebook friends was giving me the gears about swearing in my status. We had a bit of an argument back and forth but rather than deal with the drama, I just decided to delete her comments altogether from my status to make it seem like we never argued at all. What came next was a very long tirade of a Facebook message sent to me by the same girl. Now that I think of it, I don't believe we're friends anymore lol, which brings me to my next one.

3) Delete / remove a friend from your list without telling them: There's two kinds of responses you can get from this:
a) The Awkward Response: it's not really a response at all but more of an awkward interaction with the person when you see them in person next. They somehow slip it into the conversation about how they suddenly can't see your photos or any of your status updates anymore, and you are left trying to gently break the news to them that you'd rather not be Facebook friends.
b) The Pissed Off Response: Every so often I'll go through my list of friends and start removing friends that I don't keep in touch with and/or don't talk to at all. One time when I removed 300 friends in one sitting, I was expecting the biggest backlash from some acquaintances that I kind've talked to but didn't really care for. The next day, I got this three paragraph long, ragefilled Facebook message from someone I had just met a couple days earlier at a party. She seemed like the vain kind of person that kept track of her Facebook friend count on a weekly basis, and graphed it for trending analysis. What's funnier about the situation was that she barely said two words to me during the party while I was asking questions about her in getting to know her. Weird.

4) Invite your whole friends list to a promotional event: I'm not sure if I'm the only one who does this, but if I get an invite to an event that seems to come out of the blue, I'll see how many total people were invited to the event. If the number tends to be >50, there's a good chance the person who invited me doesn't give a crap if I attend or not. There's an even better chance that I won't show up and I'll ignore any future event invites from that person.

5) Invite your whole friends list to play terrible Facebook games: "Oh, Candy Crush is a fun game? I've never heard of it! Thanks for inviting me to play, when should we play together? What? It's not multiplayer? Then why are you inviting me to play? Ohh, you don't actually want me to play, but you want me to click a button so that you can play more. How thoughtful of you..."

6) Post status updates about every small thing you did (or your baby did) for the entire day:

John ate a bagel (Posted 6:22 AM)
John is driving to work (Posted 7:00 AM)
John is stuck in traffic (Posted 7:10 AM)
John hates Mondays (Posted 7:12 AM)

Thanks for that.

7) Look through a friend's profile picture history (preferably of the opposite sex), and like one of their profile picture's from at least 2 years ago: This one is my favorite, so much so that I decided to try it myself last week. The amount of awkwardness and reluctance that I experienced just clicking the like button was astounding. I can only imagine how awkward it was for my random female friends (sorry ladies lol), especially when I didn't explain myself.

The funniest part about this one is that I think men and women react in different ways. I know when it happened to me I thought to myself "Oh, that's random. That's cool I guess".

But when a woman goes through the same thing, it has potential to be so much worse. Obviously there are some pretty creepy dudes out there, and I can see the legitimate reason for concern here. You have a full catalogue of pictures of yourself from almost every angle possible that can be viewed by any of your friends. As soon as that notification comes up "Creepy Nick likes your photo", it may as well be a flashing red light along with the emergency siren. That's the only way to know for certain that someone has been creeping through your photos. That's it. The real world equivalent would be if a woman came home from work, walked into her bedroom, and found a guy that she barely knew sitting on her bed, flipping through her photo albums. This is made worse if the creeper stops at a beach photo of you and says "Oooh I like this one".