The Vine: April 6, 2011
I have a social-media etiquette question. Is it ever okay to tell someone the truth about why you unfollowed them on Twitter?
A little backstory here. “Nina” is a friend of mine from childhood. We were relatively close through high school, but started to lose touch in college, moved to different cities, and so on. We probably haven’t seen each other in person in ten years, so really, we’re more acquaintances than friends now, although I wish Nina the best and I’m sure she does me.
The thing is that Nina is a compulsive updater — she updates her Facebook status eight times a day and has ten times that many tweets. It’s usually stuff about what she’s having for lunch or a song she’s listening to, not anything I really “need” to know about her life, and the volume has gotten overwhelming. On FB I could just hide her, but you don’t have that option on Twitter, and some days she’s my entire Twitter stream practically. And it’s starting to make me like her less, honestly.
I would just unfollow her, but she doesn’t have many followers so she would probably notice. In fact, I know she’ll notice and I know she’ll mention it — on Facebook, because she’s done that before when people unfollowed her and she felt hurt. I would rather not deal with it but a part of me thinks maybe it’s time somebody told her nicely, for her own good, that she’s updating too much.
What should I do? I don’t want to hurt her feelings and I do want to stay in touch with her, just, you know, not every five minutes.
Unsocial
Dear Unsocial,
I unfollowed Roger Ebert for the same reason. It’s different, of course — Ebert would never notice, much less get offended and call me out — but the rationale for unfollowing Nina is the same. I would step away for 15 minutes and miss tweets from people I actually know personally because Ebert had tweeted 20 times, and this is nothing against Ebert, but that doesn’t fit with how I use Twitter.
So, if you’re asking whether you should unfollow Nina just on general principles, the answer is yes. If you’re asking whether you should tell her why…I don’t know. I don’t know that you have a friend-based obligation to tell her that she’s pesty with the updates, if that’s what you mean, and if she emails you to ask, that’s one thing, but if she puts it on blast on Facebook? (Provided you even see it, that is; you mentioned the possibility of hiding her, but not whether you’d done it.) I personally would not appreciate that kind of emotional blackmail, and would not respond to it; her whole approach to the medium strikes me as…”young,” for lack of a better term, and if that’s the approach she takes, you’re probably best off not dealing with it at all.
But if she emails you and says something along the lines of “I’m bummed out that you unfollowed me — did I say something wrong?”, and she seems open to suggestions, you could try telling her what I just told you about Ebert: that it’s nothing personal, but she updates a lot, and you just couldn’t keep up. She may get the hint, she may not, but you’ll already have unfollowed her, so, there you go.
Not that you shouldn’t care, or shrug off the friendship, but I’ve heard some hair-raising stories about managing in-laws and other relations on Facebook, so this is relatively low-impact; if she chooses to get offended or otherwise be a baby, just put your head down and ignore it. But if she’s still special to you, you could take the opportunity to suggest an occasional Skype-‘n’-wine phone call to get caught up like IRL friends, instead of relying on social media. She feels loved, and you can hide her FB updates with a light heart from now on.
Tags: etiquette friendships Roger Ebert
And then there’s the coward’s way out: if you mostly use Twitter on your phone, there are apps that will hide someone for you without unfollowing. On Tweetcaster, for instance, it’s called “zip it.”
I unfollowed my cousin for the same reason – it was 90% Foursquare check-ins. I told him more or less the same thing, that it was nothing personal but I only checked Twitter a few times a day and it was overwhelming. He wasn’t offended, for whatever it’s worth.
If you want to unfollow or defriend her, I’d say go ahead. I’ve done it quietly when it’s your case, and I have no animosity, just not interested in the person’s posts, or directly when the person has done something offensive. (i.e. you say that a stream of comments on a picture referring to the First Lady as “skank” and “ghetto trash” are “so funny”, I’m going to tell you I’ve decided I don’t need to know you anymore). Thankfully, I haven’t had the “WHY DID YOU UNFRIEND ME?” drama yet.
If she asks you by phone or in a personal e-mail, I’d tell her. Not rude or mean, just simply say you update more than I can keep up with, or some version of what Sars said. I disagree about ignoring her if she posts on facebook and tries to make a big heaping drama out of it. If she does that, I’d comment on the post that it’s nothing personal, and if she wishes to discuss it by phone or e-mail, to get in touch, but you won’t discuss a personal matter between the two of you on a public forum. That should shut down the drama pretty effectively-anyone else with an ounce of sense will see that you are handling it like an adult, and ignore it. Then she’ll either make the move to talk to you personally, or she’ll have to just move on.
So hear you on the Ebert thing. I love him, and love his blog, but the tweets. THE TWEETS. Also: Probst on Wednesdays. Shut up, Peaches.
A fellow social media hostage! I feel your pain, Unsocial. I have a Facebook friend who compulsively updates and is constantly inviting me (and everyone else on his friends list) to “like” his eponymous consulting business and his self-published novel. Even though I’ve long since hidden his feed the constant invitations are annoying. But I think he would notice and be hurt if I de-friended him because back when I still had his posts on my feed he would regularly update with “friend counts.”
Huh. Actually, I think I just talked myself into de-friending him anyway.
I’m not on Twitter, but there are people whose stuff there I enjoy, so I just bookmark to the webpage, and get it all at once, once a day (or whatever).
That might be a compromise (weasel way out) for you. If she asks why you unfollowed, you can pivot and say you’re following her on the internets instead of however you used to get the individual tweets. Which will be impossible for her to confirm, so….
Wow, is this where I admit to have having a Facebook and Twitter list called “Trainwrecks”?
So I use Tweetdeck on my iPhone and it enables you to create lists of freinds in a certain category. When I started following my favorite hockey teams and assocaited sites, the game-night tweets got out of control (I’m lookin’ at you Hockey Night in Canada! Enough already!), so I learned how to use the lists feature and now I can thumb over to that team’s twitter feed whenever I want, but it doesn’t intrude upon my “friends” twitter list.
And yes, I have a list called “Trainwrecks” specifically for those family and friends who are just that but would be offended if I removed them or unfollowed. And, honestly? It’s kind of refreshing when I’m feeling low to click over to one of those lists and realize just how not-wrecky MY life is in comparison.
As Kelly mentioned, I just use an iPhone app to view my Twitter stream that allows you to “mute” users the way you hide them on Facebook. Another benefit to the one I use (Echofon – which is free, by the way) is that you can mute hashtags as well. So, if, say, you don’t give a damn about the final four, you can mute #finalfour, #final4, etc, and not get any tweets that mention them. LOVE IT.
My Twitter is connected to my Facebook so whenever I tweet, it cross-posts. If someone unfriended (defriended?) me for that reason, I wouldn’t be offended and I’d understand. If I’m not your cup of tea, I don’t want you drinking it and bitching about it so I’d rather you just not drink it. That’s cool.
I’ve hidden people on FB because they post too much for my tastes but since Twitter doesn’t have that option, I’ve had to delete people from there. Sometimes celebs get really chatty when there’s a contest or big event going on – which is fine and dandy but if they post like that ALL the time? I don’t have time for that constant chatter when there are funny Seth MacFarlane posts to be read.
If you use Brizzly for your Twitter client, you can mute people. It’s really nice to be able to take a break from people without having to unfollow them – either because there would be fallout from the unfollowing, or because you just need a temporary break while they, say, livetweet a conference or something.
Pro tip: Put her on a list, then unfollow her. Twitter lists are awesome and way underused. They let you “follow” more people without seeing them in your main timeline. Put her on a list with a flattering name, like “Gems” and add some other people to it too, maybe @ConanOBrien or @StephenAtHome, maybe some other friends. You can be following the people on your list or not, so you could also add some other friends that you really do want to keep following in your main feed.
The way a list works is, it stays self-contained and you have to go to it to read it. I’m a tech writer so I’ve been added to 50 different list, usually something like “tech writers” or “Mac people” or whatever lists people started. You can follow other people’s lists. This guy Robert Scoble (@scoble) is a big list curator, and some of his lists have several thousand followers. But many lists are just for one person and only have them following it. Lists can be public or private. To start a new list, log in to Twitter.com (the actual page on the Web) and click Lists and then Create A List in the dropdown. I have lists for Food Trucks, Funny Celebs (who I don’t want to see in my main timeline, obvs, since that’s more work-related for me), Good Reads For The Bus, and so on.
That way she’ll see herself in your list — you get a Listed stat on your page that shows all the lists you’re in, probably just public ones, though, so it’s a good idea to make your list public. (No one will follow it, odds are.) And if she notices her follower count went down by one and calls you out on it, you can just explain that you were following too many people and wanted to experiment with this groovy list feature, blah blah blah organization-cakes.
Here’s an article I wrote on lists, actually. Hopefully this helps. Shoot me an email (susie at maclife dot com) if you have any questions. Sorry for such a long comment!
Oh man, Ebert. I like the guy and I know it must suck epically to not be able to talk…but still. I had to un-follow him too. I’ve given up on Twitter altogether actually. None of my friends are on it, I don’t tweet, and the celebrities whose tweets I’d actually want to read either aren’t on it or they are but don’t tweet that much. And any truly interesting tweets usually get reported on in the pop culture blogs.
Oh, @petite: “friend counts.” ’nuff said. One of my oldest, dearest friends in the world felt compelled to hit 200 “Friends” on Facebook a couple of years ago, and she raided my Friends list and sent invites to people she *maybe* had met once through me for five minutes. I had people e-mailing me, like, “Who is this person, and why is she sending me a Friend invite?” And we’re turning 40 this year.
She also calls me out on FB if, say, I haven’t returned her call or if she sent a card or something and I hadn’t acknowledged it yet. (We also have small kids, so, no, the calls aren’t returned instantly, so it’s hard to swallow the “Did you get my call yesterday?” Wall posts.) I <3 her and she's great in a million other ways, but she still has issues with not being popular as a teen, and Facebook is a damned dangerous tool for people who are still holding onto middle-school angst.
Re: original post: I got called out literally the *first* time I unfriended someone on Facebook, by a coworker I didn't like and whose invitation I shouldn't have accepted in the first place. I made up some BS about not friending coworkers, which was a total lie, but I honestly couldn't believe he was asking me about this in the hallway at work. Since then, I tend to hide people and segment people into groups who can't see my stuff. It's effin' Machiavellian in my Facebook account.
Oh sorry, one more thing about that article I posted. I wrote it last July, so a few of the screenshots are probably outdated, since Twitter tweaks their interface from time to time. (And I JUST NOW noticed an F-bomb in one of the screenshots, heeee d’oh.) But I’m sure you can figure it out. Lists: A great way to keep “following” people while totally ignoring them at your leisure.
/end geekout.
There’s another solution: Set up a Twitter client (rather than accessing your account from Twitter.com) and set up a column that consists only of people whose updates you really don’t want to miss. Tweetdeck is good, and you can use it within the Chrome browser if you don’t want to download and run a separate program.
Brizzly’s mute function is the best thing that ever happened to twitter, if you ask me. The site itself is not without its glitches–omg I do NOT have new mentions so stop telling me I do!–but the mute function makes them all worth bearing.
“Facebook is a damned dangerous tool for people who are still holding onto middle-school angst”
OH MY GOD YES THANK YOU. I secretly enjoy (because I can feel superior to) those people who post passive-aggressive status updates about unfriending people who aren’t really their friends, etc. etc. DO YOU REALLY THINK ALL YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS ARE ACTUAL FRIENDS?! Good god. Thanks for letting me get that out.
To be fair to Ebert, he can no longer phyiscally talk, so Tweeting is his version of the random conversations most people have with different persons throughout the day. He’s written several moving essays on how his life has changed due to this.
But, he’s not a personal freind of mine, and if you don’t have time for it all, you don’t. It’s not like I would hack his account or bitch publically about his damn tweet-loquaciousness. You follow or not.
And that’s really a rule with Twitter in general. You follow or not. And unlike Ebert, this is not your freind’s only means of communicating. She can have lunch with freinds and talk about the music she’s listening to or the shoes she bought or whatever. If she wants her Twitter feed to be a direct translation of her subconcious babbling, well, so be it, but you’re tuning out.
To be fair to Ebert, he can no longer phyiscally talk, so Tweeting is his version of the random conversations most people have with different persons throughout the day. He’s written several moving essays on how his life has changed due to this.
And I’ve read them all, and I’m behind Ebert the man 100%. But he doesn’t need my pity (not on that front, anyway), and if he’s swamping my stream, well, that’s it. If it’s noteworthy, someone else in my stream usually retweets it. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.
I’m totally using some of these tips for blocking hashtags.
I feel your pain! I follow a LOT of people (over 200, and that’s AFTER I culled down) so its hard for me to catch up at lunch or when I get home, since I don’t check twitter when I get up in the morning. I used to follow this girl who live tweets EVERYTHING from tv shows to concerts she’s at, etc. And it clogged up my feed. So I unfollowed her.
The first time I did it, she totally called me out on it and I blamed it on twitter ‘oh shit, I meant to follow someone else that was above/below you and it must have deleted you by accident.’ Then I’d refollow them and unfollow them again down the road. Usually it wouldn’t get noticed.
There’s someone else who seriously tweets constantly who I follow – she’s a SAHM, with 2 kids, one of which who’s at school all day and the others not old enough to go to school, so she’s home with her – and its like, ‘do you GIVE your kids any attention?’I might have to put her in a list with some other people like @Susie suggested. I have lists and um, never look at them.
DO YOU REALLY THINK ALL YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS ARE ACTUAL FRIENDS?!
That’s actually how I use Facebook! I have 41 FB friends and I could not be prouder of it. I have ignored friend requests from co-workers, people I went to high school with, and my own cousins. Anyone whose daily musings I don’t care about, or whose ignorant-ass opinions I don’t want showing up on my own thoughts and pics.
I think your approach depends upon how much or how little you are concerned about this friend’s feelings (because she obviously cares about number of followers.) If you want to follow her, but not have it in your Twitter feed, you could follow her via RSS feed; just mention in passing that you’re experimenting with different ways to consume social media. Then you can just mark her feed as “read” and move on.
what facebook lets you do is friend a ton of people, but then section off the people you don’t really care about, so you only see updates from the people you do.
if you think of things in a negative space kind of way, twitter lists let you do the same thing: you can follow a ton of people, but then section off the people you *do* really care about into a list, and just check that list, ignoring the tweets from everyone else.
if you make the list private, she won’t even know it exists, let alone that she’s not on it.
…but yeah, I can understand if you’d feel weird about making a special private list of “all of my friends except X.” It’s very reminiscent of middle school mean girls bullshit. I’d probably just follow Sars’s advice, unfollow her, and then just explain about the tweet volume if she asks.
I left an industry last year, and while I didn’t want to offend anyone by unfollowing them, I really couldn’t care less for the repeated and daily, ‘buy my book, it’s awesome’ and ‘oh, I’m guest blogging here and there’ tweets that filled my twitter stream. I made a couple of lists, put all of those people on one list and the ones who I actually want to read on another list. I use Hootsuite, and only check out the list I want to read. Now, I don’t have to be bored, and no one knows I’m not reading them… :D
I wish we could all come to an etiquette agreement, in modern society, that it is bad manners ever to ask someone why they unfriended you / unfollowed you. I think it’s OK to ask someone if they ever received your friend request, Linked In invite, etc., *IF* you have good reason to think the two of you are buds (e.g., that person said, “Friend me on Facebook!”) and maybe they just never saw it. But asking “Why haven’t you accepted my friend request?” or “Why did you unfriend / unfollow me?” … NOT cool. NEVER cool.
It just feels kind of stalkery, much like someone who gets bent out of shape when you haven’t seen them in a while and calls up all, “You don’t write! You don’t call! You don’t loooove meeee!!! You’re a bad friend!” Blech.
If someone unfriends / unfollows you, just assume they had a good reason, that it’s probably nothing personal that you should take offense to (and if it is personal, still not worth taking offense over or thinking about for more than, say, 10 seconds), and LET IT GO. GOD.
(I don’t know why this is such a sore point for me, when I’ve never had a personal drama caused by unfriending / unfollowing / delinking. But I have seen these shenanigans happen to other people, and it’s just. effing. weird.)
I don’t use Twitter, but I am a big fan of facebook and I thank God, every day, for that function that lets you hide people from your news feed.
I think that everybody has figured out good strategies, but it’s also quite interesting (I think) to consider why Nina/compulsive updaters do it. It’s all for attention, I reckon – and so is the ‘WHY WHY how dare they stop following me’ stuff on facebook, if Nina notices that anybody has stopped following her on Twitter. That’s pretty tiresome stuff for an adult to do being doing.
The whole politics of facebook friends is interesting. Most of mine are people that I would very happily sit down with for a beer, if it wasn’t for the fact that they’re all over the world. Others are old colleagues or whoever and, realistically, they’re not the people that I would catch up with – and I have occasional culls to get rid of some of them. I’m sure that they don’t notice, just when I don’t notice if somebody unfriends me (I see the number go down, but I can never spot who is missing).
I think that people over-think facebook. It’s just a tool, a way of keeping in contact – like email, or the phone. People should use it as much or as little as they like. Assumptions are made that those of us who use it every day are either (a) foolishly thinking that we have lots of friends and think of all facebook friends as being the same type of friend, or (b) randomly befriending strangers. In my case, and in the case of most people I know, it seems more to be about option (c): this is a great way of staying in touch with people around the world and, in many cases, finding long-lost friends and then taking it offline to catch up with them properly. It’s brilliant.
How about posting to Twitter yourself, something along the lines of, “Wow, I follow some talky folks! About to do some unfollows because I just can’t keep up — I promise it’s not personal!” and then unfollow everyone you want to unfollow. Then, not only does she see (presumably) the reason for it, she’s led to believe it’s part of a mass sweep and therefore *obviously* not personal.
On a related note — I check FB all of about twice a month (if that) and would quit entirely if it wasn’t my only link to a couple of family members who don’t “do” computers otherwise, so maybe it’s just me, but… why would you be friends with someone on FB and then hide their status? What’s the benefit to staying friends with them if you can’t see what they’re posting (aside from avoiding the potential “why did you unfriend me” drama)?
Glarkware alert! How many of us would buy a T-shirt that says “It’s Just Twitter” or “It’s Just Facebook”? Lots, I’ll bet.
@Liz The advantage to “hiding” is that you can then still check in with the person. If my teenage cousin is a total oversharer or posting every five minutes, I can hide her so she’s not cluttering my feed, but still click over to her wall if I want to see what’s going on in her life. It can be handy. Or if someone is a trainwreck and I don’t want to be reminded of it constantly, but occasionally, for schadenfreude reasons, I like to look at their feed, I still can.
How do you “hide” someone? I don’t like Facebook much; I don’t think it’s very user-friendly regarding privacy issues, and changing the settings don’t ever seem to do much. But there’s one relative who I think is awesome, except for her politics, and I really would like to keep her as a friend on Facebook but not see all the political stuff she posts.
Anlyn – in your feed, find one of her posts and hover your mouse over it. A little “x” box will appear in the upper right corner of her post; click it. It will give you a couple of options – to hide just that post, or to hide all posts by that person. Choose to hide all posts from that person. In the future you can still go look at her profile if you want to see what she’s up to, but none of her posts will show up in your feed.
You can also do this with annoying apps that people use that publish to your feed (like mafia wars or farmville) – click on that little “x” box and it will give you the option to hide all posts from that app.
JenV, thank you — I had the same question as Anlyn, and your answer is helpful.
Regarding the unfollowing question, I’d just do the list thing others have mentioned. If after awhile you realize that you never ever go look at her feed, then you can always unfollow her later.
@Liz. Another advantage of hiding is that sometimes it’s more drama to unfriend or deny a friend request from someone than it is to just hide and/or block them. Not only do I hide a lot of people, but my default privacy setting for posts is ‘friends only, and block this list of 20 people from seeing anything’.
There’s no drama in setting up my posts so that my horrible, bitchy grandmother – who always comments with something nasty 5 minutes after a post – doesn’t see them. But if I were to de-friend her, that whole family (that list of 20 people) would be all over me for it.
Asking someone why you were unfriended or unfollowed is bad manners because it puts the person on the spot. I have no patience for this type of drama-stirring.
Just unfollow your friend. Give her the benefit of the doubt that she won’t pitch a fit on Facebook or do anything else rude. If she does, maybe she isn’t the friend you thought she was.
I felt exactly the same way about Roger Ebert’s Twitter mania. I love his blog, it’s on my RSS feed — but his tweets just completely overwhelmed my feed and I had to unfollow him. (I use TweetDeck, and I know I could segregate Ebert tweets into a separate list/column, but why bother? If I want to dip into his tweet-stream again, I’ll just search for him at that time.)