According to a new study, couples that gush about each other on Facebook are the most annoying people on the social networking site, with 26% of those surveyed saying that overly public couples are the absolute worst.
While we do share the detestation of public love declarations on the social networking site, we don’t hate the couples that do it. If they feel the need to wax lyrical about each others’ romantic gestures on Facebook then there’s clearly not much going on in IRL. Hell, I think the last time I wrote on my boyfrined’s wall was two years ago when my phone was broken and I wanted to know if he’d eaten the rest of last night’s spaghetti bolognaise. It doesn’t mean I don’t love him, it just means I've now got a working phone through which to conduct my food-based enquiries.
So no, for us, gushy couples are not the most annoying Facebook users, although they are possibly the saddest. Here’s who really grinds our gears.
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The ‘Frapee’
Aside from the fact that the word ‘frape’ is a) really not OK and b) a lukewarm pun that reached its peak five years back, there’s a special place in our personal Burn Book reserved for the people who still think it’s hilarious to update their friends’ statuses to something like, ‘Finally decided to come out after 15 years, thanks for all the love and support guys’ because being gay is still like, the funniest thing in the world ever.
Even worse than the ‘frapers’ though, are the ‘frapees’ of the situation who* saw* they’d been ‘fraped’, chose not to delete the offensive status and instead commented underneath with something like ‘FRAPE! OMG you got me good’. Because being the butt of the joke is always hi-fucking-larious.
The Brag-ette
Thanks to, oh God, I don’t know, Justin Bieber and the rise of the selfie or some other terrible sociological trend of the 21st century, bragging on Facebook is now just part and parcel of everyday life. The trick is to be clever about it. The old, ‘Dead happy with my new job, probably fuck it up in a week,’ is fine, as is posting a picture with a celebrity without comment (with the celebrity preferably being either A-List and/or one of the Chuckle Brothers – anything in between is just pointless).
What’s absolutely not OK though is the #humblebrag; ‘Can’t believe I managed to get up at 5AM this morning AND get to the airport on time #Jamaicahereicome’ or the balls out, totally dickish shameless brag that comes in the form of something like, ‘Four years ago I was working in a shop, now I am manager of the fastest growing internet start-up in the North East. Mark Zuckerberg watch out’. This brag is, for sure, a rarer species, but annoying nonetheless.
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The Tease
‘Can’t believe that just happened….’, ‘Don’t know if I’ll ever be able to recover from this….’ are all really code for, ‘Please all comment below while I leave you in the dark for an hour before admitting that my goldfish Harry just popped his watery clogs and this is the current source of my misery.’
We’ll never forgive you for piquing our interest in something that turned out to be so terribly banal (sorry Harry, sure you were a great pal).
The lazy Googler
Back in 1998, some guys created a great little tool for the internet called ‘Google’. It’s magic really – you just type what you want to find and it’ll bring up a whole bunch of search results relating to your original question. Therefore, there’s not massively much of a need to post questions you need answers to on Facebook: ‘Anyone know the number for NHS direct?’ A classic. See also; ‘Anyone got a link to that popular music video that came out this week that’s already been viewed 100,000,000 times?’ Yes, we all do, and you know how we found them? Google. Cut out the middle man dude, if just for efficiency’s sake.
The amateur political columnist
In a world where everyone’s got an opinion and poltical blogs are two a dozen, we’re really lucky to have British Facebook friends who live in the whitest part of Britain who pen 600 words essays on the immigration debate, complete with grammatical errors and poorly researched stats. If you want to have lengthy opinions, may we point you in the direction of Wordpress or Tumblr? Both exist as great blogging tools on which you may feel free to opine away to your heart’s delight. Who knows, maybe you’ll even get a book deal.
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Follow Jess on Twitter @Jess_Commons
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.