Glens Falls (NY) Online Book Discussion Group discussion

I am starting to occasionally get requests from persons who have little in common with me. I had one person where we had 9 books in common--and I have over 1200 listed.

I do not want to be rude--but I do not want to have too many frineds. I want to be able to keep track of my friends; to keep the number of friends manageable.

Also, a few persons on my friends lists seldom review. But I do not want to remove them for fear of hurting their feelings.

May I have some advice from others in the group how they manage this?

I put a question on my profile which stopped a lot of the requests I was getting. Mine were mostly from cute, young middle eastern girls. I have no idea why such would want to friend me, but I doubt it is for my charm or good looks, so I ignore them.

If a person answers my question & I still don't think we have anything in common, I ignore them. If I don't see them around in my groups for a while & they are a friend, I delete them. If I don't say anything, they don't know unless they look. I've yet to have anyone say anything.

Mary JL, do what is right for you, and dont feel bad about it. It's not rude to want your experience here the way you want it to be. And if someone gets upset, then you know you made the right choice in not accepting them. I made the mistake of accepting all friend requests when I first joined. It turns out most of them just wanted to hawk their books, they had zero interest in me or what I was reading. I spent the better part of a day deleting them once I got annoyed enough.
Jim's idea of a question is the best way to go. It deters a lot of people and keeps your friend list to a manageable size. We are under no obligation to add friends we really don't want.

Mary JL, Jim's suggestion (about asking a question when people send you friend requests) is a good one.

At your account page click on "settings". Scroll down to where it says: "Friend Requests: You can require other Goodreads members to answer a challenge question when sending you friend requests."

Fill in the boxes as directed. Ask a question that only friends you'd want would answer correctly.

Oh, my question is simple - "Do we have books in common?" I put down that "Yes" was the correct answer, but I've had some very long answers come back. I have gotten a lot less friend requests since I put it on & none from cute, middle eastern girls.
;-)

Jim wrote: "Oh, my question is simple - "Do we have books in common?" I put down that "Yes" was the correct answer, but I've had some very long answers come back. I have gotten a lot less friend requests sin..."

LOL - Jim, that's a great question!

However, you and I don't have many books in common and yet you have been a great Goodreads friend. You've made some good suggestions and recommendations, which I have appreciated.

My question is: "Do you participate in my GR Glens Falls Online Book Group or the Constant Reader Group?" I hope my question screens out unwanted friend requests.

For a long time, my challenge question was "...are you mainly interested in selling me books you've written?" (As you can guess, my Goodreads friend circle before that had developed something like Jackie's. :-) ). That did weed out one person, who answered "yes!" :-) I just changed it to the more open-ended "Why do you want to be friends with me?"

Currently, my friend circle has 135 people, of whom 16 or so are "top friends" and a handful are real friends with whom I interact in ways that go beyond just book discussion. All but a few of these people invited me, rather than the other way around; I'll normally give a person a chance, except for the guy who admitted he was trying to sell me books. In the past, when my circle got to its present size or approaching it, I did some culling, deleting people with whom I had very little in common and who hadn't interacted with me in a serious way, at all or for a very long time. But I generally only deleted those who would still have large friend circles without me.

Now, however, I have a publisher that encourages its authors to build up large friend circles in social media as a way of advertising. So, although I don't use indiscriminate friend invitations for that purpose (I have some standards! :-) ), as a concession to the publisher, I don't cull my friend circle anymore. The main concern I have is frivolous updates from people I have no common interests with possibly crowding out updates from serious friends that I do want to read; but hopefully that's not something that would happen too often.

Werner, I think your idea of deleting "those who would still have large friend circles" without you, is a good way to resolve the friend issue. If a person has thousands of friends, most of those friends probably don't mean much to him/her. They're just names.

I agree that those who are simply trying to sell their books really don't fit into the friend category.

Sometimes it's nice to make someone a friend if you read his/her posts fairly often (even if you don't reply much). It's interesting to get to know where he or she is from and something about that person. Some people keep their info private until they become GR friends.

All good points, Joy!