Facebook thinks I have too many friends

According to Facebook I currently have 4,935 friends, which seems unlikely. I’m not sure I’ve met 4,935 people much less made friends with them, but Facebook and I define a “friend” somewhat differently.

To me a “friend” is someone you can call from a drunk tank at 3 AM and know they’ll show up with bail money.

Then there’s the very rare “hide-the-body” level of friendship that means your buddy will show up with a pickup, tarps, shovels and a chainsaw, no questions asked unless you count: “So how many pieces do you want this dude cut into and where we dumping him?”

I’ve got about four of those friends and in my opinion if you have enough of them to carry your coffin without one corner sagging, you did alright.

Anyway…

Facebook recently sent me a notice that I’m only allowed 5,000 friends and now that I’m nearing my limit maybe I should consider dumping some of my old “friends” to make room for new “friends.” So now I’m a bouncer at a social media night club; a job I never wanted or asked for.

I currently have 239 friend requests, but only 65 slots left.

This flood of friend requests might seem flattering, but as Harry Truman once pointed out, never think it’s you: it’s the office you occupy and you’re only a temporary occupant of that office. My name is familiar to a lot of people only because I was lucky enough to work at the Kansas City Star for almost four decades.

So if you’ve made a friend request and I haven’t responded it’s because I haven’t figured out who to let in the nightclub, which is a really lousy metaphor for what I we’re talking about. It’s more like a book club where hardly anybody talks to each other and alcohol isn’t available and I’m not sure why anyone would want to join.

Nevertheless, there’s a line outside the door and I can ignore the line – which is what I’ve been doing since Facebook “improved” my Facebook page and I can’t find stuff like friend requests – or I can figure out which “friend” requests to accept.

So let’s get to work on that.

People I’ve eliminated

It took me a while, but I’ve slowly deduced that hot girls from Belgium probably aren’t really interested in me personally and if someone’s Facebook page is in Tagalog maybe they’re not going to get the most out of what I do, so both those categories are off the list of “friend” possibilities. 

Also, people who are dicks.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with or “like” whatever I post, but I do expect people to not be “internet trolls” which is the label we now give to people we used to call “assholes” which seemed way more efficient because it’s got two syllables instead of four, but that’s progress for you.

Not too long ago I dumped and blocked a guy who seemed intent on showing up every day to say something rude, annoying and if at all possible, factually incorrect. The final straw was him trying to sell the idea that only six percent of the people who died from the coronavirus actually died from the coronavirus – a fallacy that had been debunked months earlier – and he was using my Facebook page to push his factually incorrect information.

If someone wants to promote Donald Trump or the fantasy that there is no coronavirus or the election was somehow rigged, they have that right, but I don’t think that right extends to promoting their beliefs on my Facebook page.

It’s kinda like the next door neighbor putting his Trump sign in my yard.

But that’s about as far as I got in deciding which friend requests to ignore, so in desperation I turned to the fount of all wisdom, the internet. I mean when’s anybody ever gotten bad info from that source?

Internet advice

OK, so you type in your question and now Google anticipates other questions you might want answered because apparently you’re not the only moron who needs advice on the subject and here’s a question Google provided that seemed right up my alley:

What is the ideal number of Facebook friends?

According to an article on the ABC News website the number of real friends you can have on social media is 150. Not 149 or 151, so now we have that settled, thank God. A British evolutionary psychologist named Robin Dunbar came up with the number 150 and according to ABC, here’s what he had to say about it:

“We have on average five intimate friends, 15 best friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends, 500 acquaintances and 1,500 people we recognise on sight.”

So right there I already had a problem with what Robin was saying because “best” means “better than any other” and I don’t get how you can have 15 best friends.

Also, apparently you aren’t “intimate” with your best friends because “intimate friends” are a different category and I kinda wonder what they have to do to qualify as intimate and if it’s what I’m thinking of they’d automatically go into the best friend category and if you’ve got 15 people doing that for you here’s a mental high five, but the whole thing is questionable because like a lot of other British people Dr. Smarty-Pants doesn’t know how to spell “recognize.”

Now here’s more from the spelling-challenged Dunbar:

"The 150 layer is the important one: this defines the people you have real reciprocated relationships with, those where you feel obligations and would willingly do favours.”

Once again I’ve got problems and this time they go beyond the questionable spelling of “favors.” No way I’m willingly doing “favours” for 150 people.

I’ve got members of my immediate family that I’d drop like a hot potato if they asked me to lend them money, mainly because I know them “intimately” enough to realize I’d never see that money again and from then on they’d have to pretend not to “recognise” me if we saw each other on the street. So if the relationship is going to be broken anyway, why not break it before they have my money?

So I decided I didn’t want to listen to any more of Dr. Dunbar’s advice and moved on to the next question Google so thoughtfully provided:

Are Facebook friends better than real friends?

I did not make that up; it was a real question on the internet and I think the answer is obvious.

Of course Facebook friends are better than real friends because I can ignore a Facebook friend while a real friend might remind me of that time I showed up drunk at his house at 3 AM and he let me sleep on his couch so I should be willing to help him move furniture which as we all know is the true test of friendship.

There are people I’d rather never see again if our continued friendship depended on me helping them move a fold-out couch up a flight of stairs. If Juliet had asked Romeo for help moving a piano, I think Romeo would have ended the relationship, which as it turns out would have saved everybody a lot of trouble.

Back to the internet.

How to target Friends with Facebook ads

This is the headline of an actual article and it explains how to get around the limitations of Facebook and take advantage of your “friends” for fun and profit. Clearly, I’m not taking advantage of enough of you so I’ll get right on that.

The author describes herself as a “traveler” and a “puzzler” which I didn’t know were actual occupations, but I imagine she spends a fair amount of time traveling around, puzzling over why her Facebook friends think she’s a jerk.  

Back to the internet.

How do I make my Facebook friends trusted?

So apparently there’s a deal where you can designate a friend as “trusted” and Facebook recommends you do this in case you get hit on the head and develop amnesia and need someone to help you log back on to Facebook because that’s gonna be pretty high on your to-do list even though you don’t recognize your spouse or kids or remember where you live.

It’s recommended you choose the kind of person you’d give a house key when you go on vacation, but my best friends – all 15 of them – are the kind of people who think it would be funny to get on my Facebook page and post embarrassing shit while pretending they’re me which is totally fair because it’s the exact same kind of thing I’d do to them.

So what have we learned?

I’m gonna go with not a helluva lot except British people can’t spell, limit the number of people you’d help carry a fold-out couch because they’re heavy as shit and tend to fold out when it’s least convenient (the couch not the friends) and if you want to be “friends” on the internet don’t be a dick.

http://kingfeatures.com/comics/editorial-cartoons-a-z/