My Rules For Booting You As Facebook-Friend

Who hasn't been through the same experience on Facebook? A controversial issue comes up and you get dragged into a heated discussions with your Facebook friends. Be that political, societal, or a religious topic, you feel surprised about the waves that they make and people you'd thought to be considerate and articulate reveal themselves as venom throwers.

I use my Facebook feed as a way to get news from my friends' perspectives, see little delightful items that make my day, and stay in touch with and learn more about them. So anything that puts sand into this machine and makes it screech disrupts this for me.

Like a few months ago with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. I had enough and decided that I didn't want to get unreflected, opinionated, hateful updates in my stream. But instead of just un-friending my contacts, I stepped back and reflected on what actually upsets me.

The list of criteria that I came up with is now my guideline for just unsubscribing friends - having them still as friends in my list but just not receiving any of their updates - and really removing friends from my friend list.

Stage 1: Simply unsubscribing them

1. You post updates that are repetitive and boring.
   How many pictures of your cat/puppy/food can you possibly post? If you do, then make at least an effort and add some witty text, find the humor in it, or the lessons you can learn.
2. You post inspiring quotes in curvy fonts with romantic pictures.
   I get it! You look for inspiration. Great for you. But please, I don't want to see another quote that contradicts some of your former quotes and have my eyes pop out in agony because of the clash of colors and motives.
3. You change your real name to something you think expresses your spiritual soul.
   If you like to be somebody else, then you are welcome. But I don't want to keep guessing who turned from Michael Brown into Mich A Ela. It's just annoying. And if you don't want to be found, then just don't be on Facebook.
4. Your updates are too micro without context.
   I am interested in a lot of things. And certainly in what my friends experience. But if I can't read the language (I actually do the effort and regularly use the built-in Bing translation AND try to make sense out of that crappy Bing translation), or when I miss context (why was it important for you to post?) and I keep wondering what's behind it, I try to get this distraction out of my feed.

Stage 2: Unfriending them

1. You express extreme positions with vigor.
   Look, I am fine with people having opinions, but if you are off the spectrum, keep annoying people, and not integrating any of the feedback people give you, it's just not my thing. Extreme opinions are like a dick: it's good to have one, you are fine to have it, but don't show it around and force it onto people.
2. You are attacking people.
   I don't care how passionate you feel about a topic, if you lose decency and attack people verbally, become insulting, or use hateful language, then I just don't want to see you around. I am not wasting my time with negativity.
3. You are whining about other people.
   Everything you do is perfect and other people are incompetent and just here to make your life difficult. Go on with this illusion, but I am not your soul's trash-bin.
4. Your life is awesome.
   Happy to see you have an awesome life. We should appreciate every moment of it. But come on: this is the type of a series of updates that Tim Urban talked about in this blog, where the update is only serving you, but not your readers and friends.
   
5. You post stuff that I find disgusting.
   I have a high level of tolerance. I read French satirical magazines, which should give you an idea how high it is. But I don't want to see gruesome videos of people or animals getting hurt, stuff that depicts gross things, and generally stuff that does not serve a purpose to overcome serious problems ,but just feeds primitive curiosity.
6. You add me to groups without my permission.
   It's great that you have started a Facebook group, but I want to choose if it's also interesting for me. First time: okaaaay. Second time: wait. Third time: you are gone.
7. You contact my friends about me.
   Just because I am not immediately responding or choose not to do so doesn't give you the right to ask my friends (that are not your friends) to ask them about me and my opinion.

These are my rules that help me to sort it out. If you want to stay my friend and have me see your witty, clever, and absolutely non-annoying updates, then you know what to do ;-)