14 DAY TRIAL // For the past several months I took on a new practice – deleting people from my Facebook friend list on their birthdays. It may sound harsh, but it’s just the only way to do it when I don’t have the time or patience to go through the entire list.
I don’t have that many friends on Facebook, at least not by many standards. When it all started, I had about 500 of them, although it should be mentioned that not all of them vanished following their birthdays.
To start things off, I should probably explain that I joined Facebook back in November 2007, although I didn’t really start using the social network until 2009. I was playing World of Warcraft at the time and guild members were gathering up, trying to put faces behind all the people in the raid group, while also taking advantage of the social network to discuss things outside the game.
Needless to say, I wasn’t all too active. Then, a couple of friends started playing various “Facebook games,” some of which required hundreds of friends not only to send gifts and all that stuff, but also to simply be in your group in the game. In the past few years such games have started to vanish from the platform, much to everyone’s relief, or maybe I just stopped playing them all and have lost track of them.
As a result, however, I ended up gathering hundreds of friends that I didn’t even know, that I didn’t even bother knowing about because that wasn’t the purpose of it all, was it?
Years went by and they stayed there, in my friends list, even though I stopped playing the so-called “Facebook games” a long time ago. I should probably mention around this time that while I check Facebook quite often, you won’t find many status updates on my account since I’m not that into posting my every thought and action for the world to see. Links to funny videos and interesting articles? Sure! But other than that, I stick to various groups that I enjoy because they’re related to various passions of mine.
So, a while back, I decided that there was really no reason to keep all these people on my account. I never bothered making lists of close friends, so whenever I do get around to posting anything, a lot of people I don’t know can see the information.
Cut down on “friends,” increase your privacy
I’m all about privacy so my account is pretty tightly locked from this point of view – I never post publicly and I only let little stuff about my personal information viewable to anyone searching me online. So why not clean up my list of friends, too?
I never have the time or patience to actually go through the whole list, especially all 500 of them, because who does?! So I decided that every time I logged in and saw that it was someone’s birthday, I’d check out who that person was.
If I knew them in real life (friends, family, former school/high school/university colleagues), I’d wish them all the best. If I had no idea who they were, they’d immediately get unfriended.
I wouldn’t miss them since I have no idea who they are, and I’m sure they won’t be noticing that I’m not there anymore either since we never talked in the years since we became “friends.”
Another tactic I used to drive down the number of friends in my list was to go through the news feed. If I noticed someone I didn’t actually know in there, they’d get the boot as well.
About a hundred have vanished in a little under six months, and more are to follow from here on out and most of them will go in the same manner – on their birthdays. Unless I suddenly get the urge to spend a couple of hours cleaning up Facebook, there’s really no other way for me to do this.
I’m sure there are millions of Facebook users out there who played the type of games I mentioned – ones that required more friends than anyone could have and who now have all these people they don’t even know watching their every post. Well, this is for you; this is a way for you to cut down the numbers and increase your level of privacy.