I know of people who check their Facebook 20 times per day — they can’t go without checking it for any longer than an hour. If they do, they start getting twitches and withdraw symptoms. Facebook is the new drug it seems. I’m positive it has increased internet addiction among my generation.
1. Facebook is addictive
Mark Zuckerberg should be viewed like the people who sell cigarettes — they purposely put nicotine in them to get people addicted to them, so they’ll keep coming back for more.
That’s just what Mark Zuckerberg did. Just look at the News Feed, especially the Live Feed: so many links, and they keep moving downwards, then new ones pop up at the top and the cycle continues – over and over and over again. You’d think that downward motion on the News Feed would create friction on the website and catch on fire and burn the site down. Thank god for the AJAX, I guess.
2. Creepy and reveals too much about people
Facebook is creepy and too revealing about people. People upload pics of themselves on toilets, smoking dope (dope’s for dopes lol), and other acts that were once quite personal and not usually open to the scrutiny of others but are now blared out across the site for all to see — especially if you’re not careful. Does everyone need to know what colour bra you have on or have to see your barely legal beach photos (I’m sure the perverts and child molesters on the site are lovin’ it), and where you live (change your privacy settings!).
Is there no such thing as privacy anymore. Does everyone have to know everything thing about you? You don’t even need to meet and get to know people these days — just visit their profile, real their Info, check out their photos, and you instantly know everything you need to know: their family, where they live, where they go to school (where to stalk them, if you decide to one day), their emails, what they look like naked, and so on. I’ll let the following Sting parody I read somewhere online wrap up my point:
Every Post you make
Every Pic you take
Every Friend you fake
For Facebook’s sake
I’ll be watching you.
3. Stupid, useless apps
Fluffy animals, horoscopes, hearts, lollypops, and holly god, enough with the stupid apps. And send me one more Farmville invite, I dare you lol. What a ridiculous time-wasting game. People complain about not having enough time in their day and then go on to grow grass or milk cows or whatever the hell you do in Farmville. Can they think of nothing more productive or fun to do in their life than Farmville?
4. Dramatic people
Ever notice someone (especially the females) who will have an update on their status about something really vague on who it’s about or towards, and then they’ll be 25 comments by people asking “who” or “what” or where”. For example “Like, OMG, I can’t believe you just done that”. You have no idea who they’re talking about, and you don’t have any idea what the hell they done. It’s just begging people to reply to it.
Or how about those people who put excessively dramatic status updates like, “I’m so sick of this life…”. I find it funny how someone can have such strong emotions, and feel they have to broadcast them across Facebook for everyone to read. They only want a reaction from people — for everyone to comment and reassure them that “everything will be okay” or “he doesn’t deserve you” or “life will get better” or whatever. Get off of Facebook, it won’t make your life better. See a shrink, watch a funny movie, read something inspiring, go for a walk or run, do something you enjoy — but get off of Facebook and stop making your problem everyone else’s problem.
5. Hideous and unintuitive website
Vimeo is a beautiful website, ZenHabits is a beautiful minimalistic website — Facebook is an ugly site. Everything is within squares: the header, the apps, the profile tabs, pages, groups, ads — everything. And they abuse the colour blue and every shade of blue. And we can’t even change any colours. How hard is it for them to allow us to pick from a few different colours for our profile or to even customize the home page colours of the site? C’mon, it’d be easy as hell to do. Almost all other sites do it: MySpace, Youtube, Google, and so on. I’m not a computer programmer yet, but I know it’s only a matter of few colour wheels to select the colours, some if()s and else()es and CSS.
6. Useless, uninteresting, miserable info and updates
All the quizzes, all the text, everyone’s statuses, etc. — it’s always just so boring, lame, uninteresting and miserable. Like,”hmmmmmmm, bored” or “iz so unhppy wit life, y cant ppl jus get alng” or “it’s snowing outside”. Why can’t people have more interesting status updates that may actually be of some interest to people, like:
“can’t believe it! Who know shoplifting would be so much fun.” or “is enjoying life so much more now since I cheated on my wife”. or “hates my kids”. Ya know — something interesting.
7. It wastes so much of peoples’ time
I have lots of things to do, besides wasting my time on Facebook: studying for school in hopes for university, reading, watching movies, spending time with Michelle, and so on — I don’t want Facebook to waste my valuable time. People could be out learning something new, fixing problems in their life, becoming more organized and happy, spending time with family and real friends — something more productive than wasting so much time on Facebook, complaining about the weather, updating their status with boring, unnecessary things, and wasting time on Farmville. It’s hypocritical of people, “Life’s so short, but hey, are you on Farmville?”.
Facebook’s only good uses
Don’t get me wrong though, Facebook can be useful sometimes. It’s a great tool for finding long-lost high school friends, making new friends, or pretending you have friends, or to even find work, collaborate, market and advertise, and share stuff in general. Like herpes.
It’s no wonder why work places and schools ban it: it’s such a waste of time and so non-productive. All you can do on it is socialize and talk to people – just the boring, dramatic things from other people. Completely not fun or useful to me at all.
Every once in about 6 months I’ll chat with a couple friends on Facebook Chat, but I won’t go on Facebook to chat to them — I’lll use IMO.im. It’s better than meebo, and it’ll let you on Facebook Chat, MSN (I hate MSN), and even Skype (which I don’t think Meebo has yet). You don’t have to install MSN or Skype, and even better yet — you have no need to ever go on to the domain facebook.com
