The Great Facebook Purge

Yesterday, I deleted 118 Facebook friends.  Initially, I set out to delete only the people with whom I had no contact.  After an initial sweep of about 40 people, I kept paring the list down further and further.  I knocked off another 30 or so after the first sweep.  Then another 15 or so.  Eventually, I was able to shed 118 people from my bloated friends list.   The purge included:

• 31 people I haven’t spoken to in eight years;
• 17 people I haven’t spoken to since graduating college;
• 8 people I have never communicated with, ever;
• 3 people who I deleted purely because they hog my NewsFeed space with inane, boring updates;
• 1 person who I did not recognize and have no idea how we ever came to be Facebook friends.

Compared to a lot of people, I never had a substantial reach of Facebook friends (I was at 296 yesterday, and I’m now sitting at 178).  Some people have thousands of contacts.  So this wasn’t as big of a deal for me as for lots of other people.  However, if I wanted to be particularly ruthless in my cuts, I imagine I could trim the list to around 100 people.

If you have Facebook, as an exercise, why not try to delete at least 10 percent of your friends list?  For some people, this might be a handful of contacts; for others, you might have to delete 200 people.  Could you do it?  Is a broader reach of people worth sacrificing in order to focus on high-quality contacts and interactions?  In the past few months, I’ve had a hard time wading through all the crap on Facebook to get to the few things that actually interest me.  But now after the big purge, my friends list is (mostly) limited to people who I find somewhat interesting, so it’s much easier to follow.

Don’t delete me, though.  Because chances are that if we’re still friends after yesterday’s massacre, I probably like you.  For now, at least.

Tags: facebook