Deleting 3,400 Facebook ‘friends’

It had to be done manually.

I listened to several documentaries and interviews while doing it.

I did not know over 99 percent of these people.

How did I end up with so many total strangers on my ‘friend’ list?

Back in 2015 or so I was an enthusiastic fan of a show called London Real. It’s an interview show hosted by the very energetic and very needed and attention hungry Brian Rose cause just like me he will never feel like he is good enough. He’s an ex heroin addict. He’s also a very poor uncritical interviewer cause he sucks up to all of his guests. That’s normal cause Brian has an enormous need to be loved and maybe also to give love.

As part of one my very needy and doomed schemes to get attention I started randomly adding fans of the show as friends on Facebook.

In no time I saw I had 5 mutal friends in common with total strangers. Then 10, then eventually hundreds.

These fans of London Real were all doing the same thing, adding each other. So once I got some mutual friends in this community people started adding me. Easily 5 per day. Tooootaaal strangers. All needy people like me with almost no boundaries, lots of them eager to promote their website or fledgling business.

That’s how I ended up with over 4,000 fake friends.

It gave me insight in neediness, in Trump fans (some of them had political beliefs that would normally have barred them from my friends list) and into the largely sad culture of wanna be entrepreneurs.

It also had the effect that my posts became invisible to my real friends. Facebook shows your posts only to a fraction of your friends. Since the vast majority of my friends were totally fake, only a very small sample of my real friends got see what I posted. So if anything the whole experiment got me less attention than before.

I ended up with only two real friends in the wake of this: Tim Van Zwieteren in Vietnam and Stella McNab in Australia.

The more you want something the more life will confirm that you don’t have it.