Facebook Rules

I love Facebook. I really do. I'm one of those people who has it open whenever I'm working on the computer (a good portion of the day for college students) and brings it up on my phone whenever I'm waiting or bored. I love catching up on news from friends and family, both from the wall posts and pictures or from private messages. That said, the way some people use Facebook doesn't make sense to me and has actually really started to annoy me. The following is a list of my personal pet peeves on Facebook:

1. If you send someone a "friend request" on Facebook, by definition, shouldn't that person at least be someone you know? If you never have and never will talk to a person in the real world, why do you want to see what they post online? For me, Facebook is a place to keep in touch with the people I know, not try to know more about people I don't.

2. Facebook games... I actually just hate games in general, so this one is only partially a Facebook complaint. Just stop sending game and app requests. If people want to play, they'll join.

3. Why are Pinterest and Instagram activities filling up my news feed? Let's keep those accounts separate so I have something to look at when I go on Instagram and Pinterest. Facebook doesn't need to combine every single social media avenue into one site, but it seems that's where it's headed.

4. For me, Facebook is a place for entertainment. It doesn't sit well with me when people post about the death of a loved one, a complicated religious question, or a provocative political post and it shows up between a joke someone shared and pictures from a weekend party. I think we need to keep the more serious topics off Facebook and give them the respect of personal conversations rather than mass posts.

5. In life, we don't have as much control over how people see us as we do online. If we blurt something out in a face to face conversation, we can't take it back. When we say something in a Facebook post comment, we first have a buffer by having to type it out and hit send, and then we have the option to delete it after it's been posted. If someone sees us making a bad decision, we can't go back and change what they saw, but we can refrain from putting a picture of it up Facebook for the whole world to see. On Facebook, you controle what goes up and stays up on your wall, so put your best face forward! Keep it clean for the parents, teachers, and employers who might access it, but also keep it un-annoying for your friends. If you have a terrible life, telling everyone just how terrible it is probably will not help it become less terrible.

[Disclaimer: These are just personal opinions on Facebook, and if you're my friend and do these things, I still love you, and it doesn't actually bother me that much anyway, and now that you mention it, people on Facebook who complain about Facebook are actually another thing that annoys me, so I'm going to try to not be one of those people, starting right now.]