Making Facebook Meaner

When I first opened my Facebook account, about 689 format changes ago, there was something very polite about some of the interactions. If someone declined your friend request, you didn't necessarily find out unless you checked up on it, and if you turned down an invitation to an event, your name would show up on the "no" list, but that is all.

Imagine my surprise recently when, after sending an invitation to a couple hundred of my closest personal friends, I started getting notifications that this friend or that had refused my invitation! It sounds so cold and nasty! It made me realize that I could no longer just click the "no" button without consequence. I now actually find myself not responding to these requests in order to not offend the person or organization that has invited me. At worst, if my inviter or other invitees get chatty on the event page, I have to say "maybe" just so I can turn off the notifications. I even had to say "maybe" to an event that was already over recently because someone started posting a lot of comments on the event page and it was giving me too many notifications!

Now I'm worried that if I defriend someone or refuse a friend request from someone I only marginally know or don't personally know that the person will get a notification that mean old me has taken this action. I wonder how many friend requests I can accumulate without responding to them. I may be about to find out!

And while we're ranting about the site that occupies so much of my time (talk about voting with your feet — must not be so terrible after all!), I am getting quite tired of having my preferences reset when new changes come about, or having the site decide that I might no longer wish to see all of my friends' posts and switching me back to a select few it has decided I am more likely to want to see. Once I've made my choice, please leave it to me to change my mind: I don't need to be challenged to reaffirm my choices from time to time by undoing something the site does surreptitiously.

Still the best place to share photos and brief news, however, so I'm still sold, or at least rented, on it.