How to avoid “seenzoning” someone on Facebook

Ever since Facebook implemented the “seen” feature on their chatting / messaging service, conversations with friends either improved or got a lot more awkward. The idea is you get to know if your friend has already seen your message and if he/she is ignoring you – hence the term seenzone.

While we can’t really do anything to make your friends stop ignoring you, we can teach you how to ignore people yourself while appearing less rude to them, avoiding Facebook from telling them you’ve already seen the message.

Scenario 1: If you’re in the middle of the conversation and you just need to stop replying without seenzoning, you should always minimize the chat box before he/she even replies. This keeps everything a lot safer; when you return from other tabs or windows, it lessens the risk of accidentally automatically highlighting the chat to type.

Messenger version: before he/she replies, the chat head should already be minimized as well. Let the number of unread messages tick on!

Scenario 2: If you’re still not in the conversation and someone just chats you out of nowhere, most often irritatingly, you should never click on the blinking open chat box. If you click on it, you will let them know you’ve seen the message. However, if you press close (strictly not clicking anywhere else), it works and still registers the message as unread.

Messenger version: don’t engage the chat head! Dismissing it immediately works here too.

Scenario 3: If someone chats you up but you’re not there to know it immediately, the message automatically goes into your inbox, beside your friend requests and your notifications. It’s much easier to avoid seenzoning someone here as it is as simple as not clicking on the unread message.

Messenger version: unlike the desktop counterpart, unread chat heads appear the moment you go back online. The same principle applies; don’t engage!

Now, there are obviously pros and cons here. Obviously, the major pro here is that you can easily hide from people you don’t want to converse with. The con is that you can’t get a full view of their message because you have already decided to ignore it from the start. To make the most out of the downside, you can still check a part of the message through these methods:

• Check your inbox, but don’t click! You can get read the latest message he/she has sent, but that works for the most part – unless the last message is “lol” or a smiley.
• Check your phone’s notification preview, but then again, don’t tap into it! You may only get a few lines here, and even more if you have the notification expanding feature on Android, but that’s probably enough for someone you want to ignore.

That’s about it for our social network experiment. If you have managed to find a few loopholes and workarounds to “seenzoning”, feel free to tell us in the comments section down below.

P.S. Few words of advice to end with -– be interesting and don’t be annoying. That’s the best way to avoid people from ignoring you.

Disclaimer: ignore at your own risk.