99 Reasons Everyone Hates Facebook

Introduction

I am a simple man with simple tastes. I would rather crunch an assortment of Pringles between two slices of bread than slave over a hot stove for hours and I still arrogantly shake my head when I see adverts for iced coffee. I like keeping things short and simple, which is why Facebook appealed to my not-so-discerning tastes when it first surfaced.

In contrast to the messy, hyperactive, attention-deficient social networks of the time, Facebook was uncompromising and really, really blue. No options existed to customize your experience, there were no virtual crops to be unearthed and in fact, there was hardly anything to be unearthed from your friends’ pages. Streamlined, sleek and something else that begins with ‘S’, Facebook was a breath of fresh air, and because of this, it had users flocking from Friendster/MySpace in droves.

Years later, I have decided to write down 99 reasons that, when combined, explain why I hate Facebook. There are many, many articles that have been written about why the site currently palls in comparison to its previous iterations or how it has irrevocably changed humans into Instagrammed, duck-billed cretins, with each article attracting hundreds of comments from users sharing their own irritations.

My goal was to compile every last reason Facebook has become an essential pain in the ass, from which only the bravest of us can ever truly escape. Oh, and to mock people who are different from me at every opportunity. Enjoy.

Chapter 1

Idiots

1. Huge numbers of people gather together on Facebook to form the most pointless of groups

So imagine the scene: you’re in the hospital, gently holding your newly born baby girl and tears are welling up. Holding her in your hands you begin to realize how precious and delicate life really is and you discover an instant bond with a child who you will love and cherish until your dying days.

Or do you, eh? Maybe you don’t even like your daughter. Maybe she’s just an annoying sobbing weakling who you’re dying to give back to the nurse before heading home and putting your feet up.

The fact is, none of us out there will really know your true feelings, whether you even vaguely love that daughter, until you’ve hunted down an appropriate Facebook page that you can ‘Like’, thereby ensuring that your innermost feelings subsequently show up in our News Feeds.

Yes, there actually is a group on Facebook entitled ‘Like if you love your daughter’ and it’s comprised of over 140,000 of the world’s best parents. Meanwhile, ‘’Like if you love your son’ is the unassailable victor with over 190,000 ‘Likes’. What does this tell us? That 330,000 Facebook people are idiots – nothing more.

Why anyone feels the need to create such mind-bogglingly pointless groups is a mystery, yet the fact that hundreds of thousands of people feel the need – or perhaps even the pressure – to ‘Like’ them is the true mystery. Want to hear a few more crazy groups with staggeringly high ‘Likes’? Just nod your head and we can continue…

48,000 people have been suckered into clicking on ‘Join if you love your dad. Ignoring this means you don’t’. 1,300 ‘LOVE’ their dog. 270,000 have clicked ‘LIKE If You Love Jesus’ and – drum roll, please – 1.2 million of you lot out there joined ‘Click like if you love your kids!"

To put that into perspective, the latter is a Facebook page whose population is creeping up to match the entire population of Estonia. If that Eastern European nation ever decided to bring back child labor, they could potentially fight and lose a war against these good-intentioned Facebook mouth breathers.

The truth is that people will join any group that makes them feel better about themselves, and considering that it takes less than a second to ‘Like’ a page with its origins in Ahmedabad, India called: ‘Like this if you think Eminem is better than Justin Bieber’, they’ll do it.

In fact, Eminem IS better than Justin Bieber – 86,000+ people agree and there are only 71 people in the ‘Justin Bieber is better than Eminem’ camp. In other words, these pointless groups attract the easily amused and serve zero purpose whatsoever – unless you’re trying to ruin a 12-year-old girl’s day and you need statistical evidence to beat them in an argument.

2. People with Facebook pages for their pets

It’s perfectly normal to love your dog but giving it a fictional surname and backstory is just part of the slippery slope that eventually leads to pet lovers creating a Facebook page for their beloved.

As horrifying as it may sound to our burly ancestors, house pets are now part of the family and, as such, are treated with the care, love and respect that anyone would offer a hairy baby that is not allowed to use a toilet.

Let’s backtrack a little. Try to imagine the rage that must have accompanied acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie in late 2011 when his first Facebook account was blocked, as it was believed to have been an imposter. Even after the Satanic Verses author (bit controversial, that book) produced his passport, as requested, to Facebook, he had to endure another hurdle to ensure that his page read ‘Salman Rushdie’, and not his birth name ‘Ahmed Salman Rushdie’. All that effort and yet a few famous pets are getting an easy ride into the world of Facebook membership.

As infuriating as that might have been for the esteemed writer, I’d imagine that his perennially surprised eyebrows reached new heights when he came across the Facebook page afforded to Beast, the Hungarian sheepdog belonging to Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, a man who is very handsome and would never sue me.

Yep, the Oregon-born hound likely didn’t encounter any such trouble when he had his own page created and, as of this writing, Beast has over one million fans that have ‘Liked’ his exploits. We will repeat - over a million people follow the Facebook updates of a dog.

Presumably written by Zuckerberg or his wife Priscilla Chan – at least we hope no one is actually paid to do this – Beast notes down his interests as Herding Things, Cuddling, Loving and Eating while he arrogantly bookends his biography by stating I am extremely cute. Get over yourself, Beast.

The truly staggering fact is not just that OVER ONE MILLION PEOPLE FOLLOW A DOG ON FACEBOOK, it’s that millions are beginning to do the same and set up their own Facebook pages for their pets. It’s no longer enough that you rub your neighbor’s dog behind his ear every now and then, now you actually have to read the critter’s daily musings too, or ‘Like’ when they oh-so-hilariously mock their human owner.

It gets worse. Beast is nowhere close to being the internet’s favorite social-networking house pet. That dubious honor belongs to Sockington, a cat belonging to historian and computer administrator Jason Scott. As of this writing, the Twitter account of @Sockington has nearly 1.5 million followers. And you thought Kim Kardashian’s Twitter follower count was a sign of the impending Apocalypse?

I have now stared at Sockington’s tweets and his OVER USE OF CAPITAL LETTERS for the past hour and I cannot understand how or why anyone would choose to follow his daily updates (sample tweet: QUIET MOMENT OF CONTEMPLATION ON COUCH ARMREST not sure why it isn’t called a socksrest ANYWAY CONTEMPLATION OVER concluded I am awesome).

Maybe I just don’t understand this phenomenon and maybe I never will, but if that spares me a lifetime of chatting to my friend’s cat on occasions that don’t involve me being extremely lonely, then it’s a price that I’m glad to pay.

3. Liking your own status

A lot of things can go wrong when you update your status. For one thing, that link you posted to your favorite Halloween dog costumes may get no replies or ‘Likes’ whatsoever, eventually just floating on your page and stinking it up, the equivalent of a fart on a packed elevator, where everybody knows that you did it.

This leaves you with a predicament: do you delete the non-offending post altogether and pretend it never happened, while leaving yourself open to potential ‘What happened to that rubbish dog thing you put up?’ posts on your page hours later? Or do you leave a pitiful No? Nobody seen this? It’s pretty good… *cough* underneath the post in order to draw out some attention?

When all else fails, the last line of defense is to simply ‘Like’ your own post. Once people charge towards it and ask why you bothered to ‘Like’ your own status, you can reply with a smug, self-satisfied, Well it means a lot to me, OK? You probably wouldn’t understand the depths of my emotions. This usually works, even with dog Halloween costume website links.

Why people like their own status message is sure to puzzle historians in about five years’ time, so all I’ll say is that it’s a mix of vanity ("I HAVE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER IN THE WORLD XXXOX’), idiocy ( are douches) and occasionally, because people just can’t help themselves.

We’ve all been there. Who hasn’t told a rip-roaring anecdote that went down a treat with your mates but died on its feet in the work canteen?

You can stare at your feet after the punch line, disappear mid-joke and lock yourself in the toilet, or shrug your shoulders and say, Pfft… you guys mustn’t get the joke. It’s REALLY funny.

The latter of these is exactly what liking your own status is.

In my esteemed opinion, one of the most unfortunate evolutionary traits of man is that somehow we have not developed the ability to high-five ourselves. We all know how amazing high-fives are to dish out and receive, yet it’s impossible to reward yourself after a hard day’s work by holding up one hand, hoisting the second slightly higher and then bringing the first upwards in one exhilarating motion. Try it now. Try it against the mirror. It looks like a weird clap and won’t impress anybody, trust me.

Thus, millions of years (or a few thousand years) of human evolution (or God’s mystery fossil treasure hunt) have led us to one simple way of expressing our self-satisfaction without asking for other people’s attention – liking our own Facebook status updates.

So the next time your cursor is hovering ominously over the ‘Like’ button, stop and look at yourself in the mirror, literally. Then try doing the high-five. It’s a lot less embarrassing.

4. People who won’t shut up about the weekend

If the Black Eyed Peas have taught society anything, it’s that if you’re even thinking about walking your dog on a Friday evening, you are both an idiot and a weird, creepy loser.

After all, they are the titanic wordsmiths that taught us to P-p-p-party every day and smash it, like oh my God, so you’d better do what they say. These days, even untalented children like Rebecca Black (Sample lyric from her ‘Friday’ megahit: Yesterday was Thursday/ Today is Friday/ Tomorrow is Saturday/ And Sunday comes afterwards) are warbling about the joys of the weekend, so who are we to argue? It’s been a long week so get out there and don’t come back until you’ve emptied your guts on the side of the road and/or somehow locked yourself in a phone booth.

Yes, the weekend is an ever-present topic of conversation and status messages on Facebook, usually beginning each Monday morning. By the time Wednesday rolls around, however, office drones beam with pleasure as they leave their first nugget of hype for the end of the week: Can’t w8 for the wkend!!

On Friday afternoon, the collective excitement has reached a fever pitch, and nothing, not even reasonable syntax or grammar will stand in Facebook users’ way. OMG its the wkend!!! they exclaim before heading off for a night of fumbled advances, surprisingly confident dance moves and, of course, a 3am kebab that you’d have to pay a starving dog to consume.

The worst things about a Facebook user’s delusional need to share to friends that a) it is the weekend and b) that the weekend is a good thing, is that the next day, or perhaps Sunday morning, an identical status message will be read by their colleagues. It’s an update that everyone has read at one point or another and never fails to ignite a Mexican wave of face palms - Soooo hungover, never drinking again!

I know that you, beautiful reader, can’t answer me directly as you’re reading this, but is there any purpose to this status message? Should its recipients feel compassion for their near-comatose friend who p-p-p-partied a little too hard?

Granted, it was Friday and they had to get down on Friday, as everybody was looking forward to the weekend. But watch your alcohol intake in future, take a step back when someone suggests dropping a vodka shot into pint of beer and never attempt to climb a tree without pants. I cannot stress that last part enough.

As the weekend is pretty the only time you can truly dispose of your disposable income when offline, everybody gets a tingle or two when Friday rolls around. However, telling all asunder that you’re excited about this is about as useful as writing OMG, pizza is delicious!! We all agree, we’ve been there before and in a world in which you’ve got Rebecca Black and the Black Eyed Peas on your side; you must