Everyone is already doing it. Your friends are doing it. Elon Musk is doing it. Hell, Playboy is doing it. Everyone is jumping ship from Facebook. What’s your problem? Why are you still on the platform that everyone hates?
Facebook has had a rough time lately. Between being a platform for Russian trolls to spread propaganda and misinformation to sway the 2016 elections, to Cambridge Analytica using the private data of over 87 million Facebook users to sway the 2016 elections, you can say that the social platform isn’t getting as many likes. Fuck I’m a great journalist.
Combine this with conspiracy theorists saying that Facebook is tracking all of your phone calls, constantly recording you with your smartphone’s microphone, and feeds being filled with the most ill-formed, illiterate rantings of incompetent armchair political experts vying to virtue signal louder than their friends, Facebook has become a pretty toxic place. Yet, we still scroll it like cracked out addicts licking the seams for the last morsel of dopamine. What curious gluttons we are.
Let’s break down all of the problems with Facebook, and why you should protect those you care about by deleting your account and never looking back.
Inspirational Quotes
Let’s start on a high note. Inspirational quotes are garbage. Nobody needs to have a rounded ladle-full of positivity crammed down their throat. It’s one thing to have a mantra you keep to yourself or an internalized manifesto that you base your principles on, but shoveling out sappy, preachy sunshine like you are doing the world a favor just makes you insufferable. You become even more of an annoying gnat when your inspirational quotes involve any mention of god. Nobody needs that added pressure in life. What do you expect? Do you expect people to feel better by reading this trash? Is it simply masturbatory? Were you hoping your friends will comment that you turned their lives around by some crappy, over-compressed, royalty-free stock image with mangled quips of nagging optimism that you’ve shared?
Oh, was it Sunday? I didn’t know I was in church. Thank’s Karen.
I had a Facebook friend that I knew in college. Obviously, I’m going to tell you about how he shared inspirational quotes all the time, but before I do, I need to preface how much of a dumpster fire the entire situation was. This friend decided he was going to be a comedian. Hey, that’s cool. I like comedy. He would sometimes share posts about comedy events he was a part of, informing his circle of friends about what he was doing. That’s a great use of the platform, right? It sounds good so far. However, this guy wanted everyone to know what his job title was, so he prefixed his name on Facebook with “Comedian.” However, he also wanted people to be able to find him in their phone contacts, and since phone contacts are listed alphabetically, he decided to put a tilde in front of his name. Everyone who was this guy’s friend had him at the very top of their contact list if they sync their Facebook contacts to their phone. Plus, it included his title, Comedian, as his first name. Every time I needed to make a call or look up a contact, I was reminded of how much he sucked. Real funny asshole.
Oh yeah, and he shared inspirational quotes all the time. He didn’t tell jokes. He was never funny on Facebook. What, are you saving your material for the nightclub? Either way, inspirational quotes are a great reason why you should delete your Facebook account, especially if you share them.
Baby Profile Pictures
New parents love making their Facebook profile a picture of their baby. Either I’ve seen this calm down a little, I’ve become desensitized to it, or all of my remaining friends are infertile or hopelessly forever alone. It used to be a huge epidemic, but honestly, if just one person on your feed is doing it, it’s going to ruin your day. Nobody wants to see a baby. Babies are weird looking and gross. That and your Facebook profile is supposed to be you. Did you suddenly lose all of your teeth, go bald, and start drooling all the time? Oh, sorry Karen, I didn’t mean you.
Facebook is one of the few social networks where you don’t hide behind a screen name or alias, but some people choose to hide behind their own baby. I used to get a little enjoyment from the irony of seeing a baby post things like, “Ugh men can be such assholes!” and “I told him all along it was his!” and “Got my child support check who wants Dollaritas?”
Things get even weirder when a toddler gets into a relationship with a middle-aged man because Facebook pairs your profile image next to your new latest hunk of meat, Karen.
If you have a baby for some reason, please respect its privacy by leaving it off of your Facebook profile. More importantly, respect everyone else’s privacy by deleting your Facebook account.
Slacktivism and Virtue Signaling
Everybody wants to be a hero these days, but nobody wants to actually do heroic deeds. Fortunately for them, there is slacktivism. Slacktivists don’t do anything to make the world a better place, but they constantly pat themselves on the back for how valiant they are. Facebook is swarming with these lazy good-cause samurai who share posts and memes to raise awareness for a topic or cause. What do they do after they log out of Facebook?
Jack shit.
They aren’t feeding starving children or donating time or money to local charities. They aren’t contributing to cancer research or getting vaccinations to Angolans. These sloths simply click the share button when something casually scrolls by that they can stand (but not literally stand) behind.
Thanks for guilt-tripping your friends, but what are you doing about any of this, Karen?
I like calling people out as much as the next guy, but sharing some post to your friends isn’t doing a lick of good for anyone. Most people do this just to show off what a virtuous person they think they are. Please, be a hero. Delete your Facebook account and get out there and do something.
Parents
When Facebook first launched (it was called The Facebook, back then) it was only available for a select group of colleges and universities. On September 26th, 2006, Facebook opened up its doors for everyone, and since then it has been a disaster. Parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, inbred cousins, and employers were now able to get all up in everyone’s grill. Once Facebook was a haven for the cogent, now it is a copious hellscape of unmoderated palaver. Facebook used to be a communicational nook – a more bibliographical version of social instant messaging and sharing. For those of you who need an example, think of AOL Instant Messenger, but your mom is in every chat and lecturing you how to properly hit on hot babes.
What’s interesting is most people my age, who were early adopters of Facebook, don’t want their children on the platform. They don’t want their snot-nosed little twerp getting on and ruining Facebook any more than it was when grams and gramps did a decade ago. I mean, they love changing their profile picture to their diaper-clad crotch-dropping, but when their offspring reach the sacred age of 13, Facebook is still not permitted.
That’s okay though, kids don’t like Facebook anyway, because it’s a rotten heap of lame. It wouldn’t be, however, if you’d just delete your account. Do it for the children.
Fake News
People are idiots. They distrust the media but will latch on to anything that someone with a similar opinion shares. Some of the same misinformed, disproven garbage has been passed around for years, and people take it as the gospel. God bless Snopes.com, for being there to correct people who spout these easy-to-spot deceptions. Want a way to tell if someone is sharing fake news? Here’s a handy list:
- It’s obviously fake news (most common).
- It’s politically biased.
- It has anything to do with getting something for nothing.
- It has something to do with weight loss, suddenly dangerous foods, Hitler, or all of the above.
- Your uncle shared it.
If Facebook wants to become a better platform, they’d stick a Snopes button next to the Like button that automatically shares the related Snopes article on your dumbass post so I can move on with my day.
One of the most recent hoaxes to stir the pot is a rumor of a pandemic where teenagers are snorting condoms. It turns out that some videos from several years ago of a couple kids doing this suddenly became the thing that outrages everyone this week, and it is being declared a national emergency. It’s not a trend, well, it wasn’t, until you dullards made it cool again to snort condoms.
I decided to play along and created my own fake news in light of the Tide Pod Challenge and Condom Snort Challenge. I feel like teenagers are getting a lot of shit, you know, for actually steering America away from the icy precipice of Gehenna. A lot of “clever” monkey people are sharing memes about how one week, teenagers are eating Tide Pods, the next week they are getting in the way of bullets, and the next week they are marching for political reform. “LOL,” they say, from an outraged, yet reclined position.
Guess what, baby boomers do stupid stuff all the time too. I did a Google search for Florida man 50 years old and found this:
I then did this:
I made sure to give it that extra JPEG compression for that sense of gullibility.
Of course, nobody on Facebook saw it because of the shitty algorithm, and that’s my segue to the next reason why you should quit Facebook.
The Algorithm
Facebook is literally the worst social platform if you want to share creative work. Are you a content creator? Maybe you are a satirist, a comedian, a vlogger, or an artist? Facebook wants you to fail unless you pay them. Have you been working hard on building your following on Facebook? If you have a hundred followers and share your latest creation that you poured your blood, sweat, and tears into, Facebook might be merciful enough to let one person scroll through it.
I follow a lot of pages that I always assume have gone dead because Facebook doesn’t deliver their new content to me when actually Facebook thinks I’d rather see all the bullshit that devalues my Facebook experience. If I manually go to a Facebook page of something I like, I can see that it is very active with daily content. I know I can tell Facebook to give me a notification every time the things I actually have an interest in post something, but isn’t the point to see it organically? Nope. Your darlings need to fork over the cash or else Facebook will kill them for you. Delete your Facebook account and switch to Twitter, which is only half as bad.
People Quitting Facebook
The most insufferable, annoying, obnoxious thing on Facebook is when people quit Facebook. Who the hell do you think you are? Oh, you are worried that Facebook has gone too far with your private data? What do you have to hide? Also, deleting your Facebook account doesn’t even remove your information from Facebook – they still keep it, just in case. You are literally doing nothing.
When people quit Facebook, they always announce it. Nobody in the history of Facebook has ever deleted their account without announcing it to the whole world, and they ALWAYS go back a few times to check to see how many Likes they get on the post before they actually hit delete. It is like logging off Facebook is some noble deed, like slaying a dragon or sharing someone else’s photo of an organized protest. Do you expect us to christen you with a bottle of champagne on your way out?
If you delete your Facebook account, you are a quitter, and nobody likes quitters, and those who Facebook Like quitters are not your real friends.
If you are a person who deletes your Facebook, you should delete your Facebook now, and come back like every other vane sap to check to see who commented on it in a few days.
