Seven Deadly Facebook Sins

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

It's no secret that I keep a mental laundry list of pet peeves. I try not to be one of those people who yammers on about all the things I hate, but if you ask me, or if they somehow come up, you'd better believe I'm going to tell you. Recently, I realized that approximately 70% of this list comprises Facebook grievances, which I've kindly compiled for you today. Without further ado, I present to you a list of Things That Are Not OK:
  1. "Signing" all comments/status updates with your name
    We know who you are. That's how this thing works.

  2. Making your sonogram your profile photo
    Plenty of people I like very much have done this or are currently doing it, & I would like to note that I have no less love for them because of it - but frankly, the world does not need to see your wee one's first-ever photograph. Also, as a bonus - 2A, if you will - you know what's worse than posting sonogram photos as your profile pic? Posting photos of your C-section. Period. Wait, wait, who was in the room taking pictures of this? And why do you want me to see them? And in case you're wondering, yes, this actually happened. And yes, I reported it to Facebook for pornography. Mean? Maybe. But my eyes were angry.

  3. Having a joint Facebook account
    Guys. I get that you are madly in love & attached at the hip & perhaaaaps not all that trusting of one another. Maybe, if you're that nervous, you can give one another your account passwords or something. (This is a whole other issue, obviously.) But when you create a joint JaneandJohn Jackson account, I am forced to forever address you as a singular unit, losing all sense of your individuality, if it even exists. And I'm also forced to hate you a little bit, even if I really like you.

  4. Keeping your baby journal online
    There was a day, long ago, when proud parents kept baby books that were - gasp! - written by hand, complete with little tiny handprints & locks of hair, noting baby's first words & baby's first steps & baby's first experience with solid foods, both coming in & going out. Now, proud exhibitionist parents post status updates about everything from baby colic to baby crap. You wouldn't tell me when you've pooped - why would you tell me when your child has?! Some family milestones are best kept within the family.

  5. Airing your dirty laundry in comment wars
    There are things I don't even know about my very best friends that I am privy to knowing about my furthest acquaintances, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg's genius. You boyfriend cheated on you & then you had great make-up sex but then he cheated on you again? You think your ex-husband is a piece of trash who doesn't deserve to breathe the same air as amoebas on fleas on rats? You're anti-welfare & want to tell a friend who relies on it that you think she's a lazy waste of space? There are better places to have all of these conversations - like with one another or, in some cases, not at all.

  6. Creating an account for your unborn baby and/or pet
    This should be self-explanatory. Your cat can't talk, & neither can your kid. It should be obvious that neither one deserves a Facebook account.

  7. Tagging your children as yourself
    Yes, you made them. But you are NOT THEM, you crazy helicopter-parents-in-waiting! While I understand that you want to be able to keep track of the photos of your kids posted by others, there's gotta be a less weird way to go about it than mixing their baby pics with four-year-old photos of you doing keg stands. And no, number five is not the answer. Something else is. Figure it out. You're a parent, aren't you supposed to be supersmart now? Isn't that how that works?
Honorable mentions go to:
  • Using any third-party app that publishes quiz results directly to your wall
  • Automatically updating your status messages via tweet, @ & all.
  • Making real-life plans via extended wall conversation
  • Status updates about what you're eating (exceptions can be made if, say, you are particularly hilarious or eating a five-course meal cooked for you by a famous chef)
  • Quoting Train lyrics

    37 comments:

    1. Honorable Mention #4 = me :)

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    2. #4 - BIG NO!!!

      Also, quoting any lyrics whatsoever (especially if you are 25!).

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    3. I agree with everything on this list!

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    4. i hate how friends with babies have only pics of their babies! even besides their profile pics, its folder after folder of the baby. it's like, uh what happened to my friend? oh yea. baby fever :/

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    5. I almost exclusively update about food on twitter and facebook and I like it! ;)
      Can we please also add photos of pregnant belly sans shirt? I think it's fab you are pregnant that does not mean I want to see your naked belly.

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    6. OMG. One of my "friends" from childhood just got a new phone, and of course she has a text message signature that says ~*~Manda~*~, so whenever she uses her phone to upload pictures, write a status or comment on something, it says that at the end of it. SO DUMB.

      Also, I do not want to see anyones insides. Even if there is a baby in there. Don't care. Just don't. It's almost as bad as the step-family of mine that used their sonogram photo as their Christmas card. Barf.

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    7. Oh, man. Changing your profile picture to a sonogram picture is a surefire way to get yourself blocked from my News Feed. Not at all coincidentally, I've found that editing the holy hell out of my News Feed has brought my level of Facebook Rage to a more reasonable place.

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    8. For a lot of people their kids are the biggest part of their life. That is a GOOD thing, we want parents to love their children and make them a priority. Why is it suddenly uncool to enjoy one's children and be proud of them?* If you don't want to read about it, block them on facebook and be done with it. Most of us enjoy hearing stories about our friend's child and (especially if we live far away) love to see pictures of the kid(s). And at least kids are usually cute, the same of which cannot be said for some people's photos of their drunken late night adventures or updates about how much they hate their jobs.
      *Exceptions to this include oversharing about bodily functions, judgments of someone else's parenting, exclamations about how smart/advanced/better-than-your-kid/etc the child is, and the bare stomach pregnancy photos another commenter mentioned.

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    9. Re: #6, I assume you would make an exception for an adorable stuffed hippo who acquired his account one drunk night during MK? Lol. PS Are you friends with him?

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    10. TRAIN LYRICS!!! AHAHAHAHAHA that takes the cake! :)

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    11. Numbers 2 and 3 annoy the shit out of me. It's weird, unnecessary and stupid. Why are people so stupid?!

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    12. Omydearlord, the dirty laundry. How these people don’t realize they look like they never left 14 behind amazes me. And those third party apps! Please don’t clutter my wall with the fact you answered a question about me so you could try to figure out what someone else said when they answered a question about you, assmunch. And the people who want to post their horoscope everyday or the lyrics to every song they heard on the radio that day (especially because every blue moon, I want to do that, and I can’t, because I don’t want to look like them)?? KNOCKITOFF.

      Though, we both know I am totally guilty of: Posting everything my dog does (like rolling in oysters), posting things I eat (I don’t know when this started, maybe when I first realized food exists outside of frozen microwavable meals and I am still so super excited about it or something), and sometimes making my Twitter and Facebook (since it’s not the same crowd) identical… but at least I do it manually, because if there is ANYTHING I excel at, its time wasting.

      Now off to update my status to a picture of the food my @dog is eating, that I’ve tagged as myself, and the song chorus it most reminds me of and how it brings to mind the TMI moment about someone I hate so I’ll post that part, too. <3

      (I love you and maybe forced Sean to read this whole post)

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    13. But uploading photos of the bloody, dead deer carcass you just dragged in on the hood of your pickup truck is okay, right?

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    14. I love this list :)

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    15. I do solemnly swear to try not to do these things things, especially the creepy parental ones. (save for the pet one since Jon has already taken care of that :| )

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    16. I love you I love you I love you. AND you quoted Grease. Swoon. Though I find myself wanting to quote Train ...

      OMG TRAIN. I have a funny, not-at-all related story ... but I'll send you a message about it and not comment here :)

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    17. And now can you do one of these for Twitter? Because I'm sure we all have pet peeves about THAT.

      But yes, a million to #4 and to making live plans on Facebook. This also happens on Twitter which irks me to no end!

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    18. girlwiththeredhairMarch 17, 2011 at 6:30 PM

      I HATE it when people link their Facebook and Twitter and do identical updates on each. THEY ARE DIFFERENT PLATFORMS PEOPLE, use them as such!

      I like using Twitter or Facebook to make plans though :D Moreso Twitter!

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    19. I am not on facebook, but man #1 would annoy me. I hate when people sign their texts. OY!

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    20. Lol. I read this list and with each point would nod my head more and more. Yes. All of these things are freaking annoying.

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    21. haha these are soo great!!

      p.s. you're a winner! :) http://www.sandyalamode.com/2011/03/17/a-few-announcements/

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    22. And these reasons? Exactly why I'm not a fan of, nor am I on, facebook anymore. So glad I'm not too, in all honesty. Love posts like this; you always make me laugh/smile!

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    23. I love this list and agree with the whole thing. Joint accounts and having to look at acquaintances' uteruses (uteri?) in their profile pics make me want to quit Facebook every day.

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    24. If you send me multiple game requests, you will be kindly blocked. Not Ok

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    25. to date i have blocked: any app that posts tweets to status messages; any app that updates with quiz results; and any stupid freaking game that my stupid freaking friends play that tells me they bought a pig or that they need mafia coins from me and would i like to join because NO.

      i've also hidden several people from my news feed entirely.

      it's made me enjoy facebook a LOT more.

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    26. haha, hear hear!
      though I admit, if I post a pic of my niece and nephew, I tag the parents (but it's a way to share the photo if I'm lazy to send it in e-mail as well).

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    27. Haha I love these. I'm always afraid to write posts like this because I don't want people to get mad. Maybe I should...

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    28. BUT TELL ME, DID THE WIND SWEEP YOU OFF YOUR FEET? DID YOU FINALLY GET THE CHANCE TO DANCE ALONG THE LIGHT OF DAY? HEAD BACK TOWARD THE MILKY WAY? BUT TELL ME, DID VENUS BLOW YOUR MIND? ????

      HOW DARE YOU.

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    29. Yes, yes, a thousand flippin' times YES! And the joint facebook page thing? So dumb, and so DOING IT WRONG!

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    30. OMG, I love this post because I agree with them all!! The ones that really annoy me the most is people who share an account together AND tag their children as themselves. Grrrr. I know you can't help it when other people tag you as your children but seriously you can untag yourself. I hope Facebook comes up with a solution for this...if not by the time I have children, I'm making a new Facebook account just for my child so I won't be tagged as them. :)

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    31. I take umbrage with some of the comments you made disparaging parents on facebook. I'm a stay at home mom and since a majority of my day revolves around caring for my children, my facebook updates are going to reflect that. And not because I don't have a sense of my own individuality or because I am too wrapped up in my kids. I resent the idea that it would be ok for you or your childless friends to make comments about your work life on facebook but it's not ok for me to comment on mine. There is an implication here that my work is invalid or that comments I make are annoying, while comments you make about your life are somehow more inherently interesting because they don't involve children. If you decide to have children one day I hope you will reflect back on some of these statements and perhaps learn to be less judgmental about things you have yet to experience.

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    32. You are awesome for writing this. People who are offended by this need to lighten up.

      Also, I find it slightly ironic that I posted a link to this... on my Facebook. Yikes.

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    33. I think it's probably hard to be a parent and not be guilty of one or two of these. :) And it's probably hard to be a 20-something without an offspring and not be annoyed by one or two of these. C'est la vie! Let's all be friends, anyway. :)

      (Okay, I've never tagged a photo of Gabe as ME. But I haven't untagged a photo when my sister tags a photo of Gabe as me. Too much work.)

      (And I posted ONE photo of my uterus. Not as my profile photo.)

      (And I probably talk way too much about him, but DUDE, do you REALIZE how crazy-amazing having your own little human being is? Very.)

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    34. Uterus photos are OK as long as they're not your primary identifying photo, IMO.

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    35. Suburban SweetheartMay 5, 2011 at 11:30 AM

      I meant to reply to this sooner, but time got away from me. While I'm certainly sorry to have offended you, I don't feel this post was critical of parents AS A WHOLE, just of parents who share too much, who feel the need to tell me, via Facebook, the color of their child's poop, who think a profile picture is an acceptable place for an ultrasound. I just think that when it comes to parenthood & familial life, some things ought to be kept sacred - & social media has made it abundantly clear that others disagree. Your work is, of course, not invalid - though I should note that I don't Facebook about my job, either, because I find it to be, again, somewhat inappropriate.

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    36. I just found your blog and I think we might be the same person! : )
      These are all pet peeves of mine, specifically #3 and #7 (and a subset of #7: posting a picture of your child/ren (without you) as your profile picture).  Awesome post and I'm really enjoying reading your blog.

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