Delete me, whiners
I’m taking a quick break from what has turned out to be a never ending porch renovation to bring up how annoyed I get when people complain about what their “friends” post on Facebook. You don’t like pictures of my kid? DELETE ME. If you don’t know me well enough to care I had a baby then I don’t know you well enough to even notice I’ve been unfriended. Don’t want to hear about your old college roommate’s sister’s engagement? DELETE HER. I guarantee it won’t ruin her happiness right now. If I get tired of reading “OMG I got so wasted last night!!1!1!” stories from people who still think they’re 21, guess what I’ll do? DELETE THEM. My 50-something year old mom only took a week to figure out that the best way to stop seeing forty bazillion posts about how to rearrange her karma from an elementary school classmate was to DELETE HER. Done and done.
If pictures or updates about people’s major life events (graduations, engagements, weddings, babies) make you feel annoyed, maybe it’s time to get off the computer and adopt a pet. Only don’t start posting pictures of your cute new kitten because I’m sure there’s someone out there who thinks that’s totally, like, LAME.
I realize Facebook started as a networking site for college students, but once they stopped requiring a school email address all the rules for what “should” be posted went out the window. Why are pictures of people in funny hats deemed ok? How come no one ever complains about all the blurry drunken photos of someone falling off a curb? Should pictures of fabulous beach vacations be banned because they make me jealous?
I don’t do “Top 5” posts. I don’t take “Which Breakfast Club character are you?” quizzes. I don’t update my status 14 times a day with everything I eat, think or see. I don’t even publish my pictures in a photo stream most of the time. So if the thing I post about most happens to be Baby Evan, so be it. No one is forcing you to say “Oh how cute!” or “I love your baby!” or “Nom nom nom!” and if you want to sit on your couch and laugh at how funny looking he is I WILL NEVER KNOW. Go ahead and mock, I’m happy to give you a few minutes of laughter.
Stop wasting time complaining about such a non-issue when it could be used on something much more important. Like how to stop that guy you know from band camp from posting so many pictures of mostly naked Anime characters.
Hallelujah, I’ve never understood all the kvetching over people’s facebook pages. If I do something as momentous as bear a child, you better fucking believe I’m putting a photo up. In the meantime I will await your memo on what is and is not appropriate to show on my personal webpage. Whatevs haters!
I don’t delete many people (generally only racists and outspoken fans of people I hate like Sarah Palin), but I do make ample use of the hide feature. Used it most recently to “hide” the couple we’re sort of friends with who apparently don’t know how to use phones. I say apparently, because they leave schmoopy posts on each other’s walls multiple times per day, all of which wind up in my news feed. Personally I prefer to email/call/text my spouse to keep that sort of thing private, but I’m sure other people weren’t thrilled to read my status this morning about how he’d been up puking all night. So, I just “hide” the schmoopers.
Also, I think I post more about my dogs than you do about Baby E so heaven help my Facebook friends if/when I finally procreate because the world will not be able to handle it. I’m sure I’ll be posting about said child’s adorableness every 5 seconds.
If someone complained about you posting pictures of your baby, they can suck it. The only time I’ve ever gotten annoyed at someone’s FB was when her and her boyfriend would write on each other’s walls several times a day with “I love you!” “I miss you!” “Hi, Pooh Bear!” while at the same time their statuses said “I have the best boy/girlfriend ever!” “My boy/girlfriend is so hot! Love you, baby <3" and I was friends with both of them so it was CONSTANTLY clogging my newsfeed. That seemed to be a little much for me and I felt they were things that could have been more appropriately expressed via text.
But guess what I did? Hid them from my newsfeed so I couldn't see their updates. PROBLEM SOLVED.
I hide all of the stupid effing quizzes. No, I don’t actually need to know your fetish, former coworker. Especially if it’s misspelled. Ew.
I’ll take the stupid quizzes but not publish the result if I don’t like it. And I think people have removed me for being a liberal heathen, so I’ll remove them for constant bitching about Obama. The nice thing about Facebook is that you can realize who you really don’t want as any sort of friend, even in the most cursory manner.
Who complains about BABIES?! And you’re so right – periodically I do a Callous Runthrough of all my various social networking sites and if my instinctual reaction is “I don’t care what they post and I don’t care if they keep reading me”…bahleeted.