so.. what's your opinion on stalkers, if you don't mind me asking?
the reason i don't use facebook (i do have an account but i don't use it actively, and my 12 - yeah,
twelve - fb friends are the only ones who even know it's me) is that i didn't want to have people i used to know (but never cared about or don't care about anymore now) know what's going on in my life - just because it's none of their fucking business. (i also didn't want to have to deal with the possible "consequences" of
refusing their friendship, so i figured it would be best to simply not register with my real name, full stop.)
now, i don't actually mind people i might - or might not - know reading whatever i'm putting "out there" (anymore; a few years back there was an incident that did actually make me go "into hiding" from people i knew would try to follow me around online
even though we'd broken off our friendship; possibly only to spite me) - provided they either a) reciprocate where "sharing stuff online" is concerned or b) keep their stalkerdom to themselves.
i wouldn't even mind former classmates of mine - the same people i wouldn't want to be friends with on facebook! - reading along here or elsewhere
as long as i didn't know about it. "was ich nicht weiß, macht mich nicht heiß", simple as that. the reason i don't mind being online friends with people i might not be
BFFs with in real life is that while i might be sharing "personal" stuff with them (whether that be tweets of whatever crazy things are going on in my mind at a particular moment or reposts of pictures/videos/quotes/etc. i like - because yeah, in my opinion, this can be just as personal because it reflects my taste in or take
on things, goddamnit), they do so, too! i give you a bit of
myself and you give me a bit of
yourself in return (and/or vice versa). which is really nice, actually, regardless of if we "click" or hang out with all the time IRL or not.
what i
do not like is people who make it known to me they follow me around online, and continuously - and really fucking randomly - comment in 3d life on stuff i wrote or did in 2d life; stuff i might not even immediately
remember posting (about) because it happened, say, three days ago and because i actually considered it to be a throw-away thought/off-hand comment. i mean seriously, WTF? it's goddamn annoying. (and what makes it
even more annoying is that these aren't people i see, like, once a year or every couple of months - in which case even
i would argue they're probably only trying to keep up with what's going on in my life or whatever. no! these are people i see very, very often, on a very, very regular basis. .. the fact that their comments are mostly plain stupid only makes matters worse.)
when i recently discussed this with a friend, i was glad to find out i'm not alone on this. ok, so he only uses fb, which is a pretty "closed" system compared to social networks like soup or twitter (i.e. a system where you get to actively choose whom you let in on which of your updates to begin with), but even he's had this happen to him - fb friends of his who never post anything themselves nor comment on or otherwise "acknowledge" anything he shares, but who then go on about stuff he posted when he runs into them, say, three weeks later. and maaan, it pisses him off. big time. (you could actually say i'm also guilty of that, what with me not using fb for anything but reading what everyone else posts, but we see each other so often that we're always up-to-date on what's going on in the other person's life anyway, plus, he knows where to find my soup and could look it up anytime he wanted to, so..)
this, btw., is also one of the reasons i stopped using twitter.. what, a week ago? two weeks ago? i seriously don't know, because i haven't had another look at the thing ever since. (another reason was that someone else i know and actually get along with - most of the time - in 3d life, someone who's never even tweeted anything themselves and probably won't be doing so in the foreseeable future either, blocked me right upon my friending them. just so i wouldn't show up on their followers list. uh-uh. but, ahh, not without going through
my own friends list first and adding people from there. right. WTF?) so yeah, anyway.. i have meanwhile created a new twitter account (with a much shorter name, mmm) but am not following anyone or tweeting anything yet. the ones of
you i'm currently twitter friends with i
will follow again at some point in the future, just not right now. and i also won't link the new account to this soup. like, ever.
ok, i guess i'm done with my monologue now. back to my initial question: what's
your opinion on (online) stalkers?*
*please keep in mind that whatever you have to say will also be read by my stalker! (whose identity i won't disclose - for now..)
