Friend & Follow

~ Cheryl

Ian McDonald’s article reminds me that it is about time for another post about my friend & follow policy. He says:

I don’t actually Facebook or network either because I don’t want to get into the whole 21st Century social minefield of who to friend and who not to friend and who to unfriend.

I know how he feels. It is way too easy to give offense because you are not familiar with the rules of a given (sub-)community. Here’s what I do.

– On Facebook I’ll accept any friend invitation I get. I do not follow up friend recommendations unless I actually know the person being recommended.

– On LiveJournal I will friend back unless the person concerned is an obvious spammer or has really annoyed me. I may be changing this, because some of you have real blogs and I don’t see any sense in following both (this means you: Jay and Gigi). Also the list is getting rather long and I’m skipping through it very quickly.

– On Twitter I generally don’t follow people who follow me unless I know them and what they are doing looks interesting. Twitter is way too time-intensive for me to be able to read everyone.

So, who have I offended now?

6 thoughts on “Friend & Follow”

  2. I don’t add folks I don’t know on LJ, and I only add those I feel comfortable with reading my entries, although most of my entries are drek since I don’t at the moment have enough time to write about what I care about.
    Facebook I mostly treat like LinkedIn.

    So I understand your points. I hate all the politics and don’t get it, really.

    I wouldn’t take it personally if some of the people on my LJ flist unfriended me and said why.

    I suppose it must be true for more folks than me that particular sites are more meaningful than others.

  3. Hee. I assumed you dropped my LJ because I don’t tend to make personal posts very often, and do tend to make posts about things which prolly don’t interest you (Discordianism, Zombies, Music, Memes), but if you actually dropped me because I annoyed you, best let me know what happened so I can apologise!

  4. Ironically enough, My Evil Uncle John just sent me this NYT Twitter story.

    I don’t tend to use Twitter much. I was using their Jabber IM interface for a while, but then they pulled the service, and none of the alternate access methods works well for me.

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