Image via Complex Original
There is just so much to hate about Facebook. What began as a cooler, cleaner version of Myspace has become the dirty laundry hamper for everyone you've ever met. There are moments where Facebook is still good for the reasons you fell in love with it: you can still peep vacation pictures of your attractive friends and you still get posts from those few people who help keep you informed about culture and politics. Then, there are the other 99% of the people who are just letting you know what they had for dinner, posting Condescending Wonka memes, and providing their two cents on popular conspiracy theories even when no one is listening.
Out of the infinite number of things to hate on Facebook, some rile us more than others. There are those posts that make your blood boil before you finish reading the status, and that's before you get to the ridiculous attached picture and banal comments. Statuses like these perfectly display the vapid, vain, ludicrous nature of social media. They make a compelling argument for the failure of humanity ... and everyone posts them, even you. These are the 20 Things on Facebook We Hate Most.
20. Motivational Statuses
When did Facebook become the back wall of our middle school guidance counselor's office? There are many days where our feeds are jam packed with these quotes, slapped on backgrounds of pictures of clouds and stars. We're not sure where this trend started, but we are sure of one thing: no one came to the Internet to to be motivated. If we're wasting time on Facebook, we are probably past the point of no motivation anyway. That doesn't stop dozens of our Facebook friends from posting these wonderful quotes, although they probably couldn't tell you why they're doing it.
19. Fake Celebrity Quotes
Celebrity quotes on Facebook are ridiculous to begin with. We rarely change our political and philosophical stances based on news or studies, and we certainly aren't going to shift our world view because of what Brad Pitt had to say on a topic. Words of advice from the rich and famous are barely effective to begin with, but add in the fact that motivational celebrity quotes you see online are often made up or misattributed, and they begin to have only negative value. Bill Cosby never uttered the words of the quote above, he is not 83, and he is not (that) tired. We recommend you check out snopes.com before you give your favorite celebrity credit for saying any of the ridiculously dumb things that get passed around Facebook.
18. Gym Statuses
No one is going to try to sleep with you because you claim to workout. This is a common mistake made by the denizens of Facebook. It seems that the majority of females, at one point of another, let it slip that they are headed over to hot yoga after they finishes their iced latte. Very few men have resisted the urge to let the world know their delts are sore after that intense gym session. No matter what your chosen physical regime, can we all agree to leave the Internet fitness discussion to the professionals? If you aren't Jillian Michaels then no one cares what workouts you do, no one cares what protein shakes you drink, and no one cares that you're "totally going to feel that workout in the morning," bro.
17. Food Pictures
Food pics are Instagram's domain. If you want to see attractively posed friends, exotic vacation pics, and drunken revelry accented by the Kelvin filter, then you have to deal with food pics. Facebook should be a safe haven from these culinary snapshots. There is no reason that we should have to add your dull food photos to our already full plate of dull reactions to your favorite TV shows and stories about your dull relationship. If you post a picture of a meal, it had better be with a celebrity, on a yacht, or on your death bed, or such a post is unacceptable.
16. Vaguebooking
Never have we understood those strange folks who take to social media to post vague hints at things. What value does anyone get out of saying things like "I wish a certain someone was here right now." or "Today is starting to feel super special ;-)?" Perhaps you are trying to build an aura of mystery around yourself, but if you are truly trying to make yourself enigmatic, may we suggest you take it a step further and remove yourself from Facebook completely?
15. Facebook as Google
Facebook is not a search engine. None of us are waiting in the wings to give you expert advice on changing your oil, baking, crystal meth production, or whatever else you might want help with, even though you don't want help enough to actually read a book on the damn subject. Unless someone wants to sleep with you really bad, no one is going to answer your pleas for knowledge, so it might be best to stop asking.
14. Celebrity Profiles
On Twitter, celebrities feel like friends. The most notable users share industry wisdom, unique perspective, and old war stories to engage with their followers in a unique way. On Facebook, the opposite is true. Stale corporate handlers write about their clients in the third person, reminding in as many different ways as humanly possible to pick up their new album at your local Target right now. They are even represented by "Pages," as if to tell you, point blank, "the actual person has nothing to do with this page." Unless you like crappy contests and clearly-staged "spontaneous" profile pictures, celebrity Facebook does little more than crowd your feed.
13. Twitter Integration
For those of us out there who have transitioned from full-time Facebookers to multi-platform posters, it is great that Twitter, Instagram, and Foursquare all offer Facebook integration. The problem is that it always looks terrible. Whether you are trying to decipher the Twitter language of hashtags and @ replies out of context or you are squinting in hopes of making out tiny Instagram thumbnails, you quickly realize that Facebook does not play well with other platforms.
12. Farmville
Either you're a gamer or your're not. If you like video games, go out and get yourself an XBox or simply buy a game to that is meant to utilize the power of that computer you're using to uploaded cat GIFs. Why do people want to play inferior video games while they are wasting their time on Facebook? You need a break from wasting your time, so you want to waste a little time? We're looking forward to the social network that will someday exist inside Farmville, and the subsequent games that will be inside of that social network. It will go on and on until there is a Russian Nesting Doll of Internet procrastination awaiting you at all times.
11. "Free" Offers
Nothing is free. On the Internet, not only is nothing free, but people are constantly trying to trick you into spending more money. Why would someone buck that trend and dole out free iPads, Jordans, and Bill Gates inheritance portions? The jerks that post these things always toss something like, "I figured why not?" in front of their posts so we don't think that they are complete idiots.
Someone should tell them that the only person they are fooling is themselves.
10. Weather Updates
The Internet is truly an amazing place. There are websites for everything. There are websites where you can connect with your friends, such as Facebook. There are websites where you can keep up with the pop culture events of the day, like Complex. There are even entire websites that exist only to keep you updated on the weather, including Weather.com, Accuweather, and Umbrellatoday.com.
These websites are so well-developed and maintained that there is no way that we have any need to hear your thoughts and observations on the weather. Ever.
9. Fundraising
Before you burn us in effigy because you think we're badmouthing your charity run or your canned food drive, hear us out. When was the last time you gave money to a cause you found out about via Facebook? We can feel your apologetic stares through the computer screen. And the ones you feel bad about not giving to are the worthwhile causes: the cancer curing and the homeless feeding. What about the endless parade of artist friends that clog your feed with pleas to fund their acapella remakes of old Limp Bizkit albums?
Facebook: we encourage you to treat such posts like events and let us organize them in a column on the side of our screen, to be ignored for all eternity.
8. Corporate Profiles
Though we are certainly glad so many college students are able to get sweet unpaid internships out of them, corporate Facebook accounts are the worst. With their cheesy posts that are edited again and again to excise any hint of honesty and humor, these things read like the musings of a robot or Miss America contestant. Recently, Facebook has found ways to throw more and more of these into your feed. Apparently, since your boy "liked" Papa Johns in order to score some free breadsticks last year, you now get ads informing you that six of your friends "like" Papa Johns and you should too.
How do you "like" Starbucks or Wal-Mart? That's like "liking" death, taxes, reality television, or any of life's other terrible certainties.
7. Holidays
It seems that every holiday brings with it more banal Facebook posts than we saw on the same day the year before. Mother's Day and New Year's Eve are tied for the worst in stiff competition. While on New Year's Eve we are inundated with the world's soon-to-be broken resolutions, on Mother's Day we get a picture of everyone we've ever met posing with their mother who doesn't even use Facebook. That being said, each holiday brings its own terrible flash flood of repetitive posts. From Groundhog Day all the way back around the Halloween, the year is filled with painful reminders that you didn't misread your calendar.
6. People Complaining About Work
Everyone likes to complain about their job (editor's note: except the insanely happy employees at Complex), but no one ever wants to hear someone else complain about their job. Have you ever gone out with a buddy and ran into some of their friends from the office? Worse still, have you accompanied a significant other to an after work happy hour? Satan himself cannot engineer a better punishment for the interloper. But at least we can look back on the insanely dull experience and have only ourselves to blame: we chose to go. We never asked to read your statuses about the difficulties of refilling the salad bar at Ruby Tuesday's; we never begged you to regale us with tales of your intern's ineptitude with spreadsheets. If you are thinking of posting about something that annoyed you at work, what is the best result you can expect? That your post will in turn, annoy us.
5. Parents on Facebook
How hard is it to understand the Internet? Facebook is damn near 10 years old and parents still don't know how to use it. Comments that were meant to be messages, caps lock turning on and off like the waves of the endless rolling sea, wall posts to ex-girlfriends remarking that they "haven't seen [her] in a while": these are just some of the sins parents visit upon their children on Facebook. The only plausible explanation is that Baby Boomers got together and resolved to ruin our experience on the Internet by creating an elaborate ruse that they had about as much skill on the Internet as an moderately bright 8 year-old.
4. Political Arguments
We have never witnessed someone change their political stance because of an argument. And we're talking about the kind you have in person. There is no chance in Hell that someone is going to have their worldview shifted by some dude who posts hippie platitudes, a vaguely racist conservative meme, or a link to Ron Paul's web site as their Facebook status. We have no problem if you post a thoughtful political op-ed or even your own well-reasoned statement of belief. The problem comes when the inevitable comment war breaks out below the initial post. We support a constructive political dialogue, it just so happens that we've never actually seen one on Facebook.
3. Public Displays of Internet Affection
Yes, we hated public displays of affection before we were forced to look at them on Facebook. We all have some awful high school memory of closing our locker to see two of our pimply peers with their tongues down each other's throats. Now, we aren't even safe in our own homes. Every day we are subjected to digital gushing between partners. Social media, ideally, is a place to share things that we find remarkable. If you think your friends will find the thought that you love your "sweet baby gurl sooo much" remarkable, then you probably need to re-evaluate your obnoxious relationship.
2. Thirsty Men
Mark our words: no female ever popped open her laptop, saw that a guy remarked how nice her ass looked in a picture and promptly resolved to sleep with him. So, please, stop. If you think a girl looks nice in a picture, and can't resist letting her know, simply "like" the photo. That is why "likes" exist: to express an affirmative reaction to an item posted on Facebook. We don't need your half-assed poetic description of a girl's curves, and the only thing such language is going to get you from the lady in question is a restraining order.
People post photos on Facebook because they look good. They don't need you to tell them.
1. Oversharing
Oversharing comes in so many different forms. Sometimes it is a collection of rapid-fire statuses walking the world through the most mundane moments of the poster's day. On other occasions, oversharing shows up as a long monologue chronicling the drama between a Facebook friend and his/her baby momma/daddy. In other instances, the Facebooker can't help themselves from talking about the most graphic aspects of their bodily fluids. No matter what form oversharing takes, it is harmful to all of us. If we all would just take a moment before posting a status and think about how this might impact others, whether it might gross them out or make them pity your painfully dull existence, then maybe Facebook would be a better, less overshared place.