Am I rude in my "defriending"?

[wyliefool]

Given the timing of the college girl--came home on break and defriended--I'll bet $5 that Mom said something about something she saw on FB and annoyed the DD. So she decided to cut off that particular mode of sharing.

As far as the OP, I don't see why quietly defriending someone you never interact w/ could be construed as rude.

[Bottlecaps]

As long as you're discreet about the defriending (ie, not announcing it to the whole world that you've cleaned out your friends list, etc.), then I don't see it as rude at all. Most of the time when I've removed people from my friends on Facebook, it was nothing personal. I just didn't interact with them anymore. (If I even interacted with them much at all - most of them were random people I went to high school with and I realized that if I wasn't friends with them even in high school, why were they my friend on Facebook?) Even when it was something personal, I'm discreet about it and don't make a big deal out of it.

[katycoo]

Now I find that - ahem, this is an embarrassing  admission - I have to stop myself from "judging" people with anything more than 300 -400 friends. There is no way that person can keep up with every.single.post (I'm judging again, darn) of all 400 "friends" - be transparent about it & cull the friends list. Its not my place to judge, yes i know, but this tells me that numbers are more important than quality relat@tionships. Sorry, pet peeve i have. Rant over.

What might help is remembering that not every single post requires reading, and not every friendship need be a close or quality friendship.  I have connections with my FB friends for all kinds of reasons.  Some of them I don't even know IRL, and that's ok.  You and I don't have to use FB the same way.

[Deetee]

Now I find that - ahem, this is an embarrassing  admission - I have to stop myself from "judging" people with anything more than 300 -400 friends. There is no way that person can keep up with every.single.post (I'm judging again, darn) of all 400 "friends" - be transparent about it & cull the friends list. Its not my place to judge, yes i know, but this tells me that numbers are more important than quality relat@tionships. Sorry, pet peeve i have. Rant over.

What might help is remembering that not every single post requires reading, and not every friendship need be a close or quality friendship.  I have connections with my FB friends for all kinds of reasons.  Some of them I don't even know IRL, and that's ok.  You and I don't have to use FB the same way.

Ditto, I think it is totally inappropriate to judge how others use facebook and how many people they want to connect with and on what level. If someone wants to use use facebook for real friends and close family that's great. If someone wants to friend everyone that they have met on any online forum and friends of friends that post amusing comments on a status update that's fine.

I mean, there are hundreds of users of this forum and you wouldn't judge the users for being on a forum that has posts that could be commented on by hundreds of people and viewed by thousands, would you? Some people treat facebook the same way.

My barrier is pretty low. It is something like "Would I be somewhat interested to know the major life events of this person in a casual conversation and would I like to recieve a postcard from them?" If it is yes, I friend them (or accept a friend request).

(And yes, I have about 400 friends and I can remember the circumstances of friending of most of them. Most of them are real-life friends, who now live in other cities. I actually have only a small percentage of my friends in the city I live on there because I see them in real life. The others are often a combination of non posters and people who keep changing their facebook name to dodge privacy setting)