The nights are getting colder and longer, there’s nothing on telly and you’re bored on the sofa – it must be Facebook stalking season! As we head towards the end of the year, you may be reflecting on the last 12 months. Has that guy who ghosted you found someone new? Whatever happened to the girl you met in the club toilets on a night out that you were sure was your soul sister? And is your life better than your frenemy that you finally cut out? It’s surely not just us that have these questions, and Facebook must have all the answers.
Well, Facebook stalking has slowly been on the decline for a while now – it seems strange to think that there was once a time when you could look at everyone’s photos and people posted incredibly personal stuff on each other’s walls.
But in recent years, a Facebook stalk has become practically impossible unless your ex-who-you-unfriended’s cover photo happens to be especially illuminating. Perhaps it’s a sign that says, ‘I’m so alone’. One can only hope.
Maybe it's because we're all sharing less personal information on social media? Just kidding, no one's doing that, although these days chances are it's on Instagram not Facebook. Far more likely is that it's because there’s now a way to tell when someone’s looked at your profile? It’s not as obvious as ‘SOPHIE HAS LOOKED AT YOUR PROFILE’ on LinkedIn but it’s still fairly telling.
How to find Facebook stalkers
It's really quite simple to uncover who has been stalking your Facebook profile. Basically, go on your profile and look at the nine Facebook friends the site has decided to show in that grid to the left of your timeline. That is sorted, not by random (as we once believed) but according to the following criteria: people who have liked things or written on your wall, people you have recently messaged and interacted with, people whose profile you’ve stalked, people who have gone on your profile.
So if your ex shows up – that one you’re friends with but haven’t interacted with or looked at for years, and they’re in that grid: they’ve been looking at your profile.
Yep, gone are the days that you could spend hours Facebook stalking someone – not just in terms of privacy, but because once everyone has learned about this rule, you’ll know you'll show up in the grid. And nobody wants to be in the grid.
An ode to the good old days of Facebook stalking:
1. You’d find a picture of someone they sometimes hung out with in one of your friend’s photos
Boom, all you needed to do was trawl through their photos to find a picture of them and you’d not only have their name, but you’d have their profile. Now, if you see someone they hung out with tagged in a picture, you can’t look through their photos unless you’re friends. Or they happen to have old albums that aren’t private.
The only way to find your stalking object via one of their friends timelines is if said stalking object has posted to their timeline. And nobody writes on anyone’s timeline any more. It used to be called a wall. Now it’s just link bait from your mum.
2. You could poke
OMG poking used to be a thing, for like six months, before it became the barometer for bad student stand-up. ‘Hey, instead of poking, why don’t we just have sex?’ Oh lol. But seriously, it was the equivalent of matching on Tinder except you saw the person regularly.
3. You’d be able to look at what they wrote on people's walls and learn about their personality/grammar abilities
Remember ‘Stevie wrote on [Insert Name’s] wall? And the ‘See wall-to-wall’ option? Hours of fun looking at past conversations, finding out that they go to that coffee shop loads or how they’re likely to be at that club on that night?
Now all we’ve got is ‘See friendship’ which only works if you’re friends with them. And again, nobody writes on anyone’s walls so even if there was a wall-to-wall, it’d be really boring.
4. You could see what they looked like
Every time anyone went out in the noughties, there’d be an album put up called something like ‘Messy night’ containing 119 pictures of varying degrees of quality. You could see them at their grossest, you could see what they really looked like.
Now, you’ll be lucky if one picture goes up after a night out. And it’s usually been airbrushed to a horrifying extent.
5. You could spend hours going through their pictures
We all knew that everyone was looking through our photos, we just didn’t want it to be vocalised.
But apart from the fact that you can now only look at photos if you’re friends with the person, you also have to be wary of spending too much time on there thanks to finding out about this new ‘Friends’ grid algorithm.
Do you want your ex to know what you’ve been doing?! Probs not.
The moral of the story: don’t stalk your ex on Facebook, guys, it’s not worth it. We promise.