When you vet someone for whether you can be close friends with them, what's a seemingly unimpactful characteristic about someone that would instantly rule them out as a potential close friend for you?

That's a big one. Also lack of hobbies or passions.

This is exactly what tanked a potential relationship for me a few years ago.

They said seemingly unimpactful. If you don't immediately see being a rude pos to strangers, ESPECIALLY those in customer service, as a red flag, then you're a few nickels short of a dollar.

Right?

Maybe you don't like the wording, but everyone does this. Unless you know if someone will be a close friend the moment you lay eyes on them, or are friends with literally everyone you've spent time with.

For real this seems like a major red flag.

you're on lemmy

What about excessive lemmy usage?

Define "someone else". Because there's a big difference between expensing a fancy dinner on a work account, and doing so on your friend who said "I got you for tonight"

Its not so much having friends to vet them.

its meeting new people that seem, for all intents and purposes, cool and mellow people.

Then you make the mistake of sending them an off-platform friend request and are quickly brought to realization that the only thing keeping them cool and mellow was the platforms rules and reporting.

I got duped like that once in a game, Kept running into eachother and playing together, so sent them an out of game friend request.. Immediately received a massive tirade about what they really thought about trans people, and gays, and other various topics. 100% unprompted, and out of the blue 0-100 in .00237 second.

The only reason I didnt immediately block them was because I was too stupified and took me a solid minute to gather myself. Ended up having to block them in game, too.. Which I think resulted in them being banned, since they sent me a huge message in game about i must be one of those liberal trans homosexuals since i blocked him after his "truth" or whatever bullshit. Reported his ass, and never saw him again.

Crazy is super good at concealing itself, until it thinks you are a compatriot.

Honestly though, this big for me as well. I didn't used to think I would care - not everybody has the same skills and all that - until I met someone failing all 3 categories. Unfortunately he's also my coworker and I have to run clean up on basically everything he does. He has worked there 3 years now and still messes up on the same, most basic stuff I've walked him through countless times before. It's exhausting when they make no progress and you're being held personally responsible for their growth and improvement.

You're only friends with people who can speak the same multiple languages or someone who speaks the only language you know?

You probably got machine-corrected, that's ad hominem. But yes, not being able to handle an argument healthily is a big handicap in life

Oddly enough your rigity on this is why we could not be friends.

I read somewhere that apparently lefties aren't as susceptible to knowing which toilet paper direction is objectively correct.

So it's basically like one of those mini-disabilities, like being horrible with directions, or not being able to remember peoples' names. Go easy on the poor fellows, they can't help it.

Depends on the disagreement... if the topic under discussion is as inflammatory as abortion or trans rights, I'm sure you can understand why some folks can't agree to disagree.

Same for any pop media. Some is fine, but if they think every current trending show or movies is "the best" than I know they don't have a system of standard.