I guess I'm a simpleton. Here's what bothers me: if it's "strictly business", then drop the facade and just make a no-nonsense business proposition. It is the duplicitous nature of this "friend" shit that gets me. Two people seem to become friends over a funny shared experience, but then they implicitly intend for that to become a business agreement with tit-for-tat benefits without ever actually formally making it such.
That is where 90% of this IBS shit happens. Two grifters catch each others orbit over something fun, then start scratching each other's backs, and when one or both violates the terms of their unwritten contracts (which is different in each person's mind), they go to the court of public opinion to ruin one another and settle this "business" issue and consume the other's fanbase.
One of the grifters early on wanted me to audit his thread so that it didn't have his real name. I told him no, I couldn't do that, and even if I wanted to people would notice and it would hurt the entire site. He did not take it well at all and basically iced me after trying to be very friendly for months. Later on, when I tried talking to him again to ask for something he could produce that wouldn't cost anything but his time, he explained to me that because I had not helped him he would refuse to help me. He chided me for being juvenile and not knowing how the world worked.
The most frustrating thing about that experience is I could have helped him. The problem was, what he needed and what he asked for were two different things. I could have very easily helped him with his problem without touching his thread. His pride refused to allow him to simply say what was wrong, what he was doing, and that he needed my help - something which would have allowed me to come up with the better solution. He instead asked for a favor as a friend, and when I said no, he decided we were not friends. In the end, he ended up spending thousands of dollars for professional SEO scrubbing services. You won't find his thread searching any of his aliases now.
None of these people are your friends. If I had gone to LA and done something embarrassing, my version of the gunt picture would have been posted by my "friends" themselves.