Now that Facebook has pretty much destroyed every other social networking site (though I'm looking for a literature themed one, a la last.fm, and if it doesn't exist, then I will call it BookBook), it has become the haven of everything that you can possibly imagine. Everything that we hate about the internet is there now: old people, fandoms, forums, personality quizzes, and the people that, in truth, you once used the internet to avoid. Still, it's the best option out there; less garish than Myspace, less whorish than makeoutclub (or any of the dozen other sites like it), less elitist than last.fm, and more useful for the billions of forums out there. I've had my Facebook page for four years, was there when it let in high schoolers, then corporations, then pretty much everyone, created groups, a newsfeed, applications, games, and fan pages. This means that I witnessed the backlash against every single one of those things because the truth is that if you give people something for free, they will find reasons to hate it. I've avoided joining most of the backlash discussion, since the majority of the time it's pointless. The real problem with Facebook isn't the website, it's the people who use it and often abuse it. And no matter what I do, there's nothing that can keep these things from clogging up any sort of unfiltered News Feed, so here is my list of What Not To Do when it comes to Facebook:
The Ten Dumbest Things To Do On Facebook
10) Treat your Facebook like a Twitter Feed
Twitter, if you care, is meant to be the future of social networking, which is code for "in three months, no one will care about it". The idea is simple: a user writes about their lives in 140 characters or less. I have one. It's a fun experiment, like when your English teacher tells you to write a story without adjectives. Also, famous people have Twitters, so you can feel like you're best friends with, I don't know, Al Gore. Facebook changed their News Feed layout shortly after Twitter's rise in popularity, making it apparent that the creators of Facebook really didn't want Twitter to steal their thunder, in an internet game of "anything you can do, I can do better". Facebook had already had status updates for a while, now they just spiffed them up with the option of "sharing": posting links, pictures, whatever. While the idea of this is decent, it is the root of most of the clutter problem with the News Feed: people do share, and they share a lot. Hey, I liked a movie. Let me tell you about it. I had a test today. Here's how I feel about it. I took a quiz about what "Twilight" character. Let me tell you how surprised I am! Thankfully, one has the option of NOT sharing every last detail of their life on Facebook, but people either don't use that or they don't want to. The result is a News Feed clogged with a billion off-key rusty horns blowing a billion innane songs at my face at the same time, which takes me right from "being interested" to "hoping you will die and not update about it".
Where you can do this without repremand: Twitter
9) Join/create groups that are numbers
This is on the way out, since groups are also on the way out in favor of the simpler pages. Still, you see tons of these all around the 'book: "1,000,000 Strong for Barack Obama" "2,000 People Against The Golden Compass" "A Million Christians on Facebook", and so on. And after that you have the second type of number groups, the result number groups: "For Every Person Who Joins This Group I Will Send $1 to Darfour" "If 2,000 People Join This Group, Doug Will Eat Dog Food For A Week" "If 4,000 People Join, I'll Lose My Virginity". Sure you will, kid. If Facebook says so. The entire message behind these groups isn't "hey, look, there are thousands of people who are like you!", because you could easily find that out...just by looking the number of people in the group. What it really says is "let's see how many people we can rope into thinking this is funny/clever/relevent! I'll bet it's at least 1,000". The worst part of this is that the groups seldom reach the level that they intend to, and still, people join. They love doing it. The worst offender of them all? "If 1,000,000 people join this group, nothing will happen", or as I like to call it, "If 1,000,000 people join this group, then we will have evidence that there are at least 1,000,000 douchebags on Facebook."
Where you can do this without repremand: On some forum that is tucked far away from the world so that I can't see it.
8) Post profile pictures that are not of you
First of all, it's dishonest. People want to see what you look like (even if you're ugly. We need a warning). Secondly, it's immature, you're making your Facebook profile, which you plan to use for "Networking" or "Random play", the same as your gamer profile on XBox Live. Third: it's generally a dickish and pretentious thing to do. What, you really think that you're just like The Terminator? You want to put up some cubist painting to say, what, "I'm too artsy for my face"? What's that? A LOLCat? Man, those aren't even funny by themselves after ten seconds.
Where you can do it without repremand: Myspace
7) Post vague, self-involved status updates
I know, I know, everyone's a poet. We all love the idea of saying beautiful and profound things, and on Facebook, you have the ability to say them to hundreds of people at the same time, and then wait on edge to see if they will Like it or Comment. Let me put this simply: Facebook is not a place for poetry. Actually, most of the internet isn't, as most people learn by the time they're 16. Still, people post sentences that are not sentences, usually having to deal with breaking up with someone or hating someone or sunflowers or how they hate someone they broke up with, but the updates are so vague that it's like they're wanting everyone on Facebook to comment enthusiastically, "what do you mean? My god, tell me, you're so mysterious!" No you're not. Stop trying to be artistic on Facebook. Remember: you're on Facebook.
Where you can do it without repremand: LiveJournal
6) Randomly friend people
On Myspace, the idea was to have a thousand friends; not really to talk to them or find out what they were doing with their lives, but to just have them, like a collection of action figures. Occasionally, you friended someone you actually knew. Rarely, you met someone on Myspace and met them in real life (presumably for sex). The beauty of Facebook is the exclusive feel to it. It started as a place where you could only add other people who were in college, and even though it grew from there, the idea was generally the same: only add people that you at least know personally in real life. This is mostly due to the limited profile that Facebook shows to anyone who doesn't know you. It keeps Facebook clean, for the most part. Still, though, there are plenty of people with hundreds of friends, and this seems to be for no other reason that they just decided to blanket friend everyone they could have met in their lives. And true, I could say no, but still, I hate the idea of having my Feed clogged with updates from people who are, at the very least, strangers that I don't feel scared around. The way to solve this? Ask someone if they're on Facebook first. And ask to friend them. At least there will be some real world interaction...
Where you can do this without repremand: Myspace
5) Create/attend events that are not really events
This is what an event is: an event is a party. It is a party for people to get together at. Here's what an event isn't: a place where people can give someone their phone numbers. A vague reference to something, such as "Mary is attending the last day of school." And it's not really a nation-wide thing, either. You don't "attend" the first presedential debate on TV. You don't "attend" voting in American Idol. It just doesn't make sense; it's almost the same as one of those pointless groups, only it seems immediate and important. I remember a time where I was invited to FOUR events where someone had lost or gotten a new phone, and needed my phone number. How do you RSVP to that? Why not just send people messages?
Where you can do this without repremand: Eh, nowhere really
4) Make groups/pages about what pisses you off on Facebook
If sayings were literal, then Facebook is a big giant gift horse, and there are hundreds of thousands of people clamoring into eyesight of its mouth. Every day people join more and more of these groups. Facebook, in the beginning, was so popular that every small development was noticed by more and more people, generating more and more of a backlash against it. It started when Facebook opened it's e-doors to high schoolers and then the real world. People hated it. Then they created the news feed. People hated that. Every single formatting shift, every tiny change in the site's design, hate hate hate. Most of the time the changes didn't really effect the overall accessibility and use of Facebook, and I've yet to hear of someone destroying their Facebook because they moved the wall from one side of the screen to the other. And if it isn't things that Facebook is doing wrong, it's things that people think the site would die without: colored themes, music, HTML coding (basically, everything that Myspace has). Facebook, of course, has never taken any of these suggestions to heart. The new popular one is the idea of creating a "Don't Like" button as a contrast to the "Like" button, which is sort of a symbol for Facebook in general: we want the option to hate what we're getting the priveledge to see. Now, you could say that I'm doing the same thing by harping on it right now, but rest assured: I'm not making a group about it. The whole thing reeks with what I call the You Think You Know Better fallacy: for example, when you're at a store and someone says that it's organized wrong, or that the computer should work in a different way. It's the idea that the system isn't broken, the system is just stupid, and thou art the bearer of common sense in a mad world. The truth is that, most of the time, things work pretty well, and are pretty well designed, and if there's a problem, you aren't the only person who knows about it. If the designers at Facebook thought that customized profiles and Don't Like buttons were good things to have, then they would put them up there. The flipside of all these groups are the conspiracy ones, the "join this group if you don't want Facebook to cost money/be racist/give information to the government". These, of course, are fed with a nice thick slice of bullshit pie.
Where you can do this without repremand: Anywhere in Boca Raton
3) Becoming fans of things that are concepts
At first, pages were a great idea: it's like a group, except that it's consolidated (for instance, instead of having thirty groups that are Virginia Woolf fan clubs, you could just have Virginia Woolf herself). During the presedential elections, Obama and McCain groups could use their wide Facebook audience of "fans" to send out notifications, news items, etc. They were a sort of addition or substitute for your Interests, a more colorful way to show people what you cared about. But, like anything that a million people are given influence over, the Pages were led astray. Now you can become a "fan" of cuddling, morning sex, summer vacation, sleeping, waking up, playing video games, driving a car, speaking french, eating meat, being vegetarian, kicking puppies into the faces of babies, etc. The problem with this is that it's stupid: you end up with tons of pages that aren't of actual things, but just concepts. I suppose that people think that they're being clever, it's one of those phrases that I can see the Cohen Brothers giggling over five or six years ago. The truth of the matter is that saying "I'm a big fan of cuddling" wears out its welcome the first time, and finding out that there are a thousand "things that are not things" to "be a fan of" makes you sort of want all that 2012 stuff to come true.
Where you can do this without repremand: Nowhere. We're getting into no man's land here.
2) Add applications like it's going out of style
Do you play Mafia Wars? Put "flair" on your wall? How about bumper stickers? Got any fake pets? Wanna write a movie review? Show off every bit of "Office" trivia that you know? How about a quote generator? A LOLcat generator? How about give a gift? Or a poke? Or a hug? Or a fake trip to Tahiti? How about a hatching egg? Growing flower? Free gift? Rank your friends? I know! Do all of those things, and then send me invites to do them as well, because everyone is interested in those things. Everyone wants to join the "I'm gonna clutter the fuck out of my Facebook page" group! Or they can be fans of it? Yeah! We can be like those people who get so many tattoos that you forget that they're someone who has feelings or, you know, a life. Who needs a life? I'm playing Risk!
Where you can do this without repremand: Nowhere
1) Quizzes
These just need to stop. Unconditional surrender. Quizzes are not only applications that you have to add that plaster themselves all over your page, but they also take up plenty of space on the News Feed. And there are quizzes for everything, which means that there are thousands of people taking them and dozens of them posting them on my home page. And to what effect? Are they bragging? Do they think I'm interested? I get that it's fun (which is why people plastered Quizilla results all over their myspaces back in the day), but must we do it all day? Facebook is meant to be a networking site, not a place for wasting away trying to learn what sort of disney villain you are. Not only are the regular quizzes annoying and pestering, but now people have gotten the idea of creating quizzes about themselves, with a "how well do you know...." title. To which I kindly say: you are not that important. Please grow up, at least a little bit. The Quizzes have become terribly unsightly and second-hand embarrassing, and reduce the Facebook news Feed a little closer to the level of Blaring Myspace Page. And no one wants that again.
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