I remember the excitement as I registered for my Facebook account, at the sweet age of 14. Name. Date of Birth. Email address. Check. Check. Check. At that moment, if anyone had told me that account wouldn't last long, I'd probably have screamed and argued about how Facebook was one of my greatest online discoveries (second ONLY to Blogger, at that age)
Now, fast forward to present day. And that excitement has over the years and months slowly turned to irritation and dislike (sometimes described as detest even), resulting in a complete removal (in facebook terms, deactivation) of myself from the social networking site.
So what is this dislike for Facebook about? It seems the twitterverse (the new King of social media) is trying to figure it out too. The trending topic #5reasonsIHateFacebook has been in the top 5 worldwide trending topics for hours, WORLDWIDE.
I've picked out some that I could relate to from the bunch of tweets:
@Jaypee_2much: "#5reasonsIHateFaceBook Getting tagged in pictures of Jordan Heels -_-"
@thesmithxx: "#5reasonsIHateFaceBook those stupid invites to those stupid games"
@DiddyTheBoy : "#5reasonsIHateFaceBook Dumb statuses. The Timeline. Beg for likes. Little kids swearing they're in love 💏 Dumb game requests 👾"
@giirllprobz: "#5ReasonsIHateFacebook Obviously you don't think the picture is ugly, YOU UPLOADED IT."
We've all being there with the above, we've all had those facebook moments; where you think 'Oh My Gosh, this is just ridiculous', I'm sure of it.
Consequently, I put my social media loving brain to work, attempting to decode this growing hatred for Facebooking. My conclusion? Short of simple.
So why have we come to detest/dislike Facebook?
The graduation of social media, has allowed us to 'recreate' our lives online, more so with every new creation. Take twitter for instance, there are so many accounts, which are set up without any real identity -many people can hide behind celebrity pictures, eggs, logos, shoes, clothes etc (used as avatars) and tweet anonymously, and still grab attention and gain a large following. We love a little bit of mystery in our online lives. Apparently.
Now, Facebook on the other hand is built on the idea of sharing information with people we know in our actual lives. The idea of 'friending' someone is a lot more personal than gaining a new follower. For one, you don't have to get the tweets of a new follower but a new Facebook friend pops up on your feed every so often (depending on their usership).
At first the idea of having a website space to interact with people in your life (old friends, new friends, friends across the pond, whatever) seems fun and appealing but that soon fades.
To me, the growing 'hatred' with Facebook is down to human obsession with want and our discontentment with what we have. Those are the things that drive us more towards the twitters and tumblrs.
But then again, it may simply, just be that Facebook is old and we want the latest toy. Or that you're more likely to get a celebrity response via twitter than Facebook (if that's your thing), or maybe it's the fact that once a Facebook account is created it can't be completely deleted. EVER.
All in all, it's really just down to individual preferences [as active MySpace and Bebo users will tell you].
Note: None of the tweets in this blog post are mine.