Does Facebook Randomly Delete Friends From Users Friend List
Facebook is seen by some as a popularity contest. Isn’t it true that having more friends makes you more popular in your peers’ eyes? Possibly.
Adding friends on Facebook used to be all that mattered. It’s no longer the case. It’s all about removing pals on Facebook these days. There are some reasons why facebook randomly delete friends from users friend list. They are as follows:
- It is detrimental to your mental health.
According to research, maintaining more than 150 real-life connections at the same time is difficult. The phenomenon is known as “Dunbar’s Number,” named after the Oxford University anthropologist who first found it. Any number higher than that, he says, begins to “tax the human brain’s cognitive capability.”
The funny thing is that you may have 1,500 friends on Facebook, but when you look at website traffic, you’ll see that individuals retain the same inner circle of about 150 people that we see in real life.
If we start with that figure and throw in a few long-lost high school pals and other individuals you need to communicate with on a regular basis, we’re looking at a total of 200-250 Facebook friends.
Facts back up this figure. Facebook users have an average of 338 friends, while the median is just about 200. This implies that some individuals have a disproportionately large number of friends, skewing the average.
- You’re Putting Your Best Friendships at Risk
If you’re one of the 15% of users with more than 500 friends on Facebook, you may be risking your closest connections for a few online praises.
In an article for The New Yorker, Maria Konnikova was the first to make the argument, writing:
We can simply keep track of the lives and interests of over 150 individuals via social media. However, we lack deeper ties with them if we don’t spend time with them face to face, and the time we spend on surface relationships comes at the cost of deeper ones.
Dunbar agrees with her and says, “You have a certain amount of social capital. It requires a significant amount of time. When you make more connections, your set quantity of social capital is spread out more widely, resulting in a lower average capital per person.”
It seems that distinguishing between real-life and virtual pals is the key.
Should you be making a funny comment on a picture of someone you met on a beach in Thailand while eating with your family? No way. Is it, however, a good idea to have a record of your relationship on Facebook in case you wish to revisit it later? Possibly.
- It aids in the protection of your personal information.
Aside from intellectual considerations, there are many practical reasons for deleting Facebook friends.
Privacy is one of them. Yes, we all know that Facebook offers a slew of options for restricting access to pictures, posts, and personal information to certain subsets of your friends, but few people really use them. (Be honest, how many of you have taken the effort to create specialized groups of close friends with whom you may discuss things?)
Facebook has been around for decades, and if you were one of the early adopters, you’re likely to be among the 15% of users with more than 500 friends stated earlier.
You should consider whether or not you want all of these individuals in your life (and whether you want to keep creeping on theirs).
You know how it is: you have pals on your list who you haven’t talked to since elementary school, but you know their children’s names and how many times they’ve married. Worse still, these individuals are aware of the same information about you. That’s strange to say the least.
If you’re truly concerned about your privacy, take a peek at our list of what Facebook knows about you.
- It will assist you in decluttering your newsfeed
This is also a good reason to dislike items like airlines and hotels, since it will make your News Feed more cleaner and more pleasant to browse.
Is it really that important that your former employer has booked a table at a Prague restaurant? Or that a random pub you used to frequent in college is now selling tickets to its newest Tuesday night extravaganza?
It all goes back to the conversation between Dunbar and Konnikova. By removing your friends (and likes), the news you should care about will appear more prominently on your feed, enabling you to focus on the connections that are essential to you and dismiss the ones that aren’t.
- They’re Just a Pain in the Neck
There has been a lot of study done on Facebook postings that are “annoying.” On this site, we’ve looked at the issue of vaguebooking, but that’s just scraping the surface.
2,000 individuals were polled in 2014 to find out why they would remove someone from the site. The following are only a few of the explanations given:
68 percent of people boast too much.
Sixty-six percent have a point status.
48 percent of people want to play a game.
41% of people want attention.
Selfies taken in excess (38%).
Getting rid of individuals that irritate you online makes sense. Why should you allow your social media feed to annoy you? There are enough things in the world to make us angry already.
There are methods to respectfully ignore someone on Facebook if they’re a real close friend. Give them the elbow if they don’t already have it.
On Facebook, how do you decide who you want to unfriend?
It’s all well and well to make these arguments, but when the going gets tough and your mouse hovers over the unfriend button, it all seems a little too definitive.
How do you know you won’t see them in five years and become BFFs?! What if they figure out they’ve been thrown out?
Conclusion
Unfriending criteria must be determined by each individual. Focus on former classmates, coworkers, vacation companions, and odd common friends from the past. We guarantee you won’t forget them.
