What Really Bothers Me About Facebook

Surprisingly, privacy is not one of the things that actually bothers me about Facebook. Sure, it concerns me at times, but I understand Facebook is a business that really wants to make money. That people, including me, are stupid enough to give them all of the information to profit of our identities should really be the concern of those “concerned” about privacy. But I digress.

No, here are some of the things that cause me to use Facebook so little these days, almost to the point of where I sign on just to check to make sure my friends are still alive, and then I go do something else.

1. Annoying Games. These Facebook games bother me the most. Sure, I can avoid playing them, and that’s what I do, but they’ve managed to become equally annoying by incorporating themselves into every friend update that occurs within Facebook. I don’t care that someone adopted a virtual pig and it’s hungry. I really don’t care. Let it starve. Or become bacon. Or whatever virtual pieces of shit do when they die. Stop bothering me with that crap. The problem has gotten to the point where I’m seriously thinking of dumping friends that spam me more than once with this nonsense. I haven’t done it yet, but it’s on my dashboard of things I’m about to do because it’s practically made Facebook’s ONLY redeeming feature completely useless. By redeeming feature, I mean the ability to see what’s going on with my friends. It makes it so that on some days any useful information has been relegated to cyber oblivion because so many updates have come across from people about their new farm, their new virtual make up store concession, or latest mob hit. I don’t care. And if that’s all Facebook ends up being good for, then it’s not good for anything further.

2. The machinery of Facebook. For the longest time, one of the positive things about Facebook was that no matter how stupid the rest of the site got, contributed to by the stupid people who use the site (yes, including me), at least the site ran well. Recently, my blog posts have taken to showing up WEEKS after I post them because something in Facebook wants me to physically remove my blog posts and then reset them again, so that it will start pulling blog posts. That’s just stupid. That’s like buying a brand new cell phone so that you can walk to someone’s house and talk to them in person. Unfortunately, this is caused by the fact that Facebook is more interesting in trying to figure out how to make money off of its members than actually making the system work best for those members. If this doesn’t get fixed soon, anothe reason to dump the service.

3. Fake friends. This is one of my pet peeves that I’ve pretty much fixed by turning down practically all people who send me a friend request. Way too many people send me a friend request, and I’ve never heard of them before. I accept and then next thing I know I’m getting plastered with their friend messages that are designed to be continuous spam. Now, this is going to be a problem for me because my main reason for having a Facebook account is no longer to keep up with friends, but to promote my writing business should that career ever get jumpstarted. I’m going to have zero ability to stop this from happening in the future, so unless they set up some feature to only allow specific message to come through, Facebook will make itself irrelevant for known celebrities. And if that’s the case, I won’t close my account, but I’ll stop signing on forever.

4. Friends stop communicating. This is a footprint of the system itself that I see as being caused by the phenomenon of Facebook itself. A person starts posting stupid comments as status updates (“went to Chiptotle to eat. Yum yum” or something irrelevant of this nature), so they actually stop communicating with their real friends because they start to think that they ARE communicating with their friends. I have one friend who has stopped calling me completely, who used to talk to me on a weekly basis. I guess seeing a status update is supposed to be the replacement for that. What really happens is the friend stops being a friend, and it’s only a matter of time before we both unfriend each other because we don’t communicate any more. Sad, but that’s a footprint of how this sort of social media works.

5. Overall detachment syndrome. As people tend to recognize each other from only their Facebook postings and updates, they stop communicating with each other. But because they think they’re actually “communicating”, they don’t realize that they’re slowly eliminating their network of friends.

6. Groups you can’t get rid of. There’s a group I joined back when I was in grad school that was an organization that focused on a specific social issue. That issue was fought and lost in California. But for some reason, this group won’t die. It’s membership turned nutty, and I no longer care what they’re sponsoring these days. I even pulled myself from their membership. But that doesn’t stop them from continuing to send me messages. I don’t even know how they do it as I thought that once I was out of their group, I’d be off their list. Nope. Not the case. Happened with a couple of shows that I used to watch. With those, I”m still a fan of the show, like Monk, but the show ended. Yet, every now and then they want to tell me about something that’s going on concerning that show. But the show ENDED. So NOTHING is going on with that show. But the company that made it still thinks that they’re relevant, which they’re not. Yeah, I can probably remove myself from that list, but I’m still a fan of the show, so I always thought it was nostalgic by keeping my name on that list. Didn’t realize that I’d never stop hearing from them over really stupid pieces of information that aren’t important or interesting to anyone, even to people who used to be strong fans.

Part of the problem for me with Facebook is that it’s one of those social venues that wants to be a lot cooler than it really is. The thing that makes it cool is the people who inhabit it, but honestly I’m not that cool, so anything that has anything to do with me, really isn’t going to be all that cool. So Facebook serves to continue to remind me of that because it tries to treat my uncoolness as being somewhat cool. And that’s just depressing.