OK everyone, it’s time to have a frank discussion: you are driving me crazy. Lately several of you have taken up the habit of Facebook status update spam, wherein you select any number of obvious causes and write up or repost a schlocky call to arms (usually in all caps, indicating yelling like a braying jackass) to compel your Facebook friends to repost said message to garner awareness of your cause. There are variants of this that call for changing your profile picture to something that is not your face, a topic previously covered here. This is also annoying and I’m not going to do it.
Allow me to explain my stance and refute commonly-held impressions of these activities:
It’s harmless, lighten up!
A status update is a relatively innocuous thing, one might argue… but remember: those messages go out to the hundreds of people that are on your friends list, and each message that I have to read, recognize as an idiotic chain-letter-style play on my emotions, and take the action to hide the post takes time that could otherwise be spent looking at your photos, seeing what you are doing, or otherwise keeping track of you socially (which is what social media is intended for).
I treat this action as much of an annoying time-waster as deleting the rare spam email messages that slip through my (and Gmail’s) filter. It’s not fun, and you shouldn’t be contributing to this.
How else will these causes get noticed if nobody reposts them?
There are many cases where very just and good causes are taken up on Facebook and other social media. These causes have lovely things called Fan Pages that are there for you to participate in, which usually do not employ irritating tactics to get their point across.
Furthermore, most of these messages are structured in a way to guilt me into feeling bad if I don’t repost them and this is compounded by being perpetuated by my friends and family. Some examples:
- If you support our troops, repost this!
- If you hate cancer, repost this!
- If you love your mom/dad/sister/brother/kid repost this!
Of course I want to support our troops, hate cancer, and love my family. If I don’t repost your status update, it doesn’t mean that I tacitly support these things. Stop making me feel guilty already, and join the appropriate Fan Pages to support the causes that you like. Facebook even goes so far as to show me when we like the same Fan Pages, so I can message you directly to talk about it!
If I post in all-caps, or use annoying ASCII art you’ll read it.
This goes beyond the irritation that caused this blog post to be created. When you post in all caps, you are yelling. When you use fancy ASCII art to ornament your status update, you are annoying. There’s a wealth of information available on these topics if you type “netiquette” into a search engine. Here is one such article that outlines the main topics, just in case you don’t feel like actually Googling it yourself.
In conclusion
In short, don’t be annoying. You are all my Facebook friends for a reason, but I want to actually get value out of reading your status updates. If you were unaware that all of this is annoying and rude, that’s fine and I’m not mad at you but PLEASE STOP. Don’t make it easy for me to unfriend you just to clean up my news feed.
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