Re-Following

Description
In One-Way Following, when a person follows a user on a social media the user might feel obliged to follow that person back. There can be a multitude of reasons for this behavior but one of them could be that the user dosen't want to hurt the feelings of the person following her.

In Confirming Friendship, Re-Following occurs when users receive friend requests from other users that are considered temporary (summer job colleagues, friends of friends). The request is accepted due to the risk of otherwise upsetting the other user but the relationship is later cut off, when the chance of an away-from-keyboard rendezvous is less likely to occur.

Examples
Alice gets followed by Bob. Bob is an acquaintance of Alice and she isn't very interested in receiving content from Bob. However Alice fears that if she meets Bob in real life it could lead to an awkward situation. So Alice re-follows Bob just to avoid the strange situation that might arise.

Pros & Cons
For social systems where it's desired that a user have a lot of connections this behavior could be something to strive for.

Re-Following can lead to the user getting unwanted content and/or to friendship connection between users that does not exist in real life.

Relations
Mechanics like Publicize Relationship can contribute to this kind of behavior. It can do this since a user can verify if someone chooses to follow here after she has already chosen to follow them.

An other mechanic pattern that causes this dynamic is the one of Confirming Friendship. For Bob to be able to see Alice’s activity, he must be friends with her as well as she with him. Re-Following might lead to Self Censoring since some users does not want to share certain kind of post to others than real friends.

Contributors
Created by Magnus Spånggård and Malin Mattsson from the inspiration of Patric Westberg and Andreas.