The Awkward Silence

12:40 AM

3

Q: How can I explain why I declined someone's Facebook friend request without offending them?

Recently, I got several friend requests on Facebook from people I sort of knew in middle school. We went to different high schools, and so I haven't talked to them in five years, as I've just finished my first year in college. I prefer to keep my Facebook friends to people I would really charact...

Am I the only one who just doesn't respond to people who I don't know

I don't want to push the "decline" button because it seems too permanent

Catija

@10Replies @HDE226868 Clearly says that he knows the people... just doesn't currently have a relationship with them.

10 Replies

Well, thats the same for me. I know the people who want to be friends over facebook, I just either don't like interacting with them, or don't know them that well.

Catija

Clearly you're not the "only one" based on the comments :P

10 Replies

I see

Thats good

I guess

Catija

I think that there's a slight issue with a lot of the questions here... the "without offending" or "without being rude"... etc. I know that it's not really a good idea to respond to rude actions with rude actions but there's a big difference between setting boundaries and being "rude". "Rude" is very subjective.

10 Replies

12:49 AM

16

Interpersonal Skills – interpersonal.stackexchange.com

Beta Q&A site for the life skills we use every day to communicate and interact with other people.

Currently in private beta.

We are slipping below 5 per day :/

if only meta questions counted lol

@Catija Its hard to be percieved as rude with lack of response over internet\

expecially if you don't know the person very well

Catija

Example: I was in a grocery store talking with the customer service desk. I was in the middle of a conversation and a college-age female came over, interrupted me mid sentence and asked if she could take a balloon... something that's there for kids, not adults... and when I called her out on being rude, she started bitching at me that I was the rude one for not being a pushover for her interruption.

10 Replies

Yeah, but, everything is different over the internet

Catija

@10Replies There's a personality type thing in there, too... I had a friend from middle school who was my "friend" on FB and I recently noticed that I hadn't been seeing any posts from him... assuming it was FB's idiotic filtering, I went to his page and realized he must have unfriended me at some point... we'd actually met up recently even, so I was surprised by it... but I decided not to bother figuring out if it was an accident or intentional because it doesn't matter.

10 Replies

I don't really use facebook that much so everything matters a lot less for me

Of course all my relatives use it, so I have to glance over it every once in a while

Catija

1:10 AM

@10Replies It's the last week of private beta... that's not unusual.

10 Replies

Not unusual, but, also not good.

Catija

No, in fact, considering we're three weeks in, I think it is good.

I don't understand why you're so concerned about it.

I'm going to assume you've read both my and HDE's answer to Sagar's meta post about activity dropping?

10 Replies

Why is it good?

It certainly isn't horrible, but, I don't think it is a particularly good thing.

Catija

I'm a mod on A&C. I can tell you that, at this point in our Private Beta, we were not getting 5 qpd.

Why do you think you even need to be concerned?

10 Replies

It's not concerning, it's just not good.

Catija

1:19 AM

Why not? What do you think it should be? There are only 40 avid users and 322 total users... how many questions do you think these people should be able to produce?

If we specifically want actual, non-hypothetical questions, we can't force people to come up with content for the site. 98% of questions are answered with an average of 2.7 answers. That's great. I'm not saying that all of the answers are great... but we're answering the questions...

they're not sitting around being ignored, which means that people will be more likely to feel like they can get help here.

The Litter Box

Charcoal HQ

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