How to Decide to Defriend or Not

Defriending is as easy as a click of a mouse. Some say it can be hurtful, and others don’t seem to care. When so many online friends were gained by simply asking to be a friend, it makes it easy to defriend. Not having any communication with someone online other than a friend request makes it difficult to take the online friendship seriously. On the other hand, online friends made on forums of common interest and chatting with these online friends every week if not every day makes for a more meaningful friendship. Some want as many friends as possible for a broad online presence, while others feel that thousands of online friends is not realistic.

It might be nice to have online relationships to be similar to face to face relationships, but it is difficult to pretend to react to an unseen face. Besides, how often does a stranger approach another stranger in a grocery store say, and ask to be friends? Here are some possible guidelines for online politeness in defriending.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Decide if defriending is necessary. Does it really matter that the friends list is unwieldy? If the friend is damaging your reputation or is bothering you, defriending may be necessary. If the friend is just sitting on your list not doing anything, it may not be worth possible hurt feelings to defriend. While some are not phased by being befriended, others are, and if having that friend on your list doesn’t make a big difference one way or another, perhaps just leaving things the way they are is most kind.

2. Defriend someone who is damaging your reputation or is bothersome. Often explaining to this kind of friend only leads to more problems on your end, but a bothersome friend may be helped by a kind explanation. Quietly clicking and defriending may be the easiest answer. Sometimes in this case other steps may have to be taken such as reporting this friend who is not acting friendly.

3. Choose a different solution. It may be more effective to block or ignore an unfriendly friend instead of defriending depending on the social network.

4. Consider face to face friendships. Sometimes sending holiday greeting cards to people we’ve known is the only way we stay in touch with friends we’ve known face to face. That year may come that we don’t receive a card from an old friend. Do we write a note letting that person know he has been defriended? Do we keep sending greeting cards even though we never get any in return?
   
   Every relationship may be different, so what we do is not always the same, but chances are if an old friend stops sending greeting cards, we eventually stop sending cards too. We may, however, keep the friend’s address or we may not. The choice is up to you. So is defriending. We may just keep an old friend on our friend list because we understand that life gets busy, and we may have different interests at the moment. That doesn’t mean we want to lose complete contact with our friend. Years later we may just drop her a note. If we know defriending may cause hurt feelings, it may be just as well to leave this friend on the list.

[missnye]

on 11/7/2009 Good post. I had never given it much thought!