It’s the day after Valentine’s Day, so now it’s OK to unfollow, defriend, and break up with some of your online followers.
There’s no hard and fast rule that says you have to follow anyone online. You are in charge of what relationships you maintain or neglect online.
Many online relationships are extensions of our real lives, while others are forged entirely in the digital realm, consisting of ones and zeroes without ever having met someone in the real world.
You pick your online friends. There’s no obligation to follow and friend someone if you don’t want to, and if someone isn’t doing it for you, go ahead and unfollow them. Your followers are already treating you the same way.
Save yourself the time and stress of another meaningless online relationship. De-friend that jackass you’ve never really met, and save yourself time and stress you didn’t have to begin with.
I think that the proliferation of “friends” on every little dicky website now is the result of letting 15 year olds dictate the trends of the internet. It’s not enough to have a website that lets you interact with your “real” friends - now it has to be a popularity contest.
My self worth doesn’t depend upon the number of times someone clicks “like”, unless each click means sex. But then, wouldn’t you want some kind of filter to apply some sort of standards to the clicks? Or at least arrange them in order of some kind of hierarchy - perhaps by desperation level?
Hmmmm - excuse me while I hit the patent office.
I like that.
Wait, I don’t mean it that way…
As someone learning all about blogging and social media-yeah I so agree with your post..but it’s kind of ironic though that I found your blog
Yeah, I should blog about not reading blogs one day. That’ll be crazy ironic.
…and yet SO anti social media!
Completely agree! There’s no reason to feel obligated to be someone’s friend, whether online or off.
Thank goodness. I’m gonna go unfriend my mom now.
Right on.
There are about 6 billion people in the world. I’m going to have to blow some of them off.
Like how many? 10? 12?
I was gonna go unfollow you as a gag…I know that would be your kinda funny, but lets say I did and laugh about it anyways :-p
Feel free to unfollow me. I only ask that you come crawling back on your knees so I can laugh then too.
My ex? Oh hell, I unfollowed her four years ago. Now I just follow people I don’t know… Hold on, the police are at the door.
Quick! Unfollow them!
LOL! Too late. Anyone with bail money is welcome to follow…
Ugh… there’s this one person whose every-2-second tweets I don’t enjoy but she keeps RT-ing me, so… OK, I’ll read this blog post one more time and then hopefully I can gather some courage to unfollow.
I’ve gone for years before realizing someone who was following me unfollowed me. Maybe the same will happen to you.
Every day I keep thinking about clearing up the people I’ve just put on hide/filter, and never get around to it. Maybe I should take CHARGE of my relationships!
Be the man in the relationship and eliminate them.
I’m not a jackass, I’m just misunderstood.
Aren’t we all?
Without online friends, the geeks would have no one to be geeky with, and the apathetic loners would have no one to be emo with.
What would happen if everyone (and I mean everyone) unfriended Mark Zuckerberg? Would Facebook be taken offline in disgust or would people’s profiles suddenly go public when they were marked private?
I believe nerds survived before the digital age. At least, I think so based on episodes of Saved by the Bell I’ve seen.
When I first got on Twitter I subscribed to that service that lets you know when people stop following you. Life is so much better now that I stopped subscribing to that service or even caring who unfollows me.
I would become even more obsessive if I were to use an app like that, and I don’t need to be more obsessive.