I’ve noticed a lot of people I’m ‘friends’ with on Facebook seem to have lots and lots of friends. There’s a guy on my Facebook friends list that I don’t even personally know, but he’s from my hometown and I accepted his friend request because we have 45 mutual friends. I know someone else who seems to ‘friend’ pretty much everyone he’s ever met. One day I noticed that we have a surprisingly large number of mutual Facebook friends. We do have several mutual friends in real life, but only a couple of them are on Facebook. Upon further inspection I was astonished to find that almost all of the mutual Facebook ‘friends’ are my real-life friends that he’s met only once.
I can’t help but wonder what is the point of friending people you don’t even know. Facebook is a wonderful tool for getting reconnecting with old friends and keeping up with people it would be hard to keep in touch with otherwise. But if I send you a friend request, it’s because I know you. I can’t for the life of me figure out why anyone would want to sift through updates from dozens--or hundreds-- of people they don’t even know. Of course, you can always unsubscribe from people’s updates, but in that case, why have them as a Facebook friend in the first place? The only reason I can think of is to have lots of Facebook friends. But why would you do this? Is it an ego thing? Seems a bit sad, really.
Help me out with this--I’d really like to hear your thoughts. Do you get lots of friend requests from people you don’t know? Do you automatically accept friend requests? If not, what your policy on accepting friend requests?
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