10 Types of Facebook Users

I was out with Sluggy Sophia a day back and we were both uh...offering intellectual criticisms on the types of Facebook users that existed today in our social group. Well our very refined criticisms naturally ended up in a round of full on raging at the annoying categories, which partly inspired this post.

See, it is not just I who find the said people annoying.

Anyways, I was hanging out with Max today and he mentioned that people actually liked reading bitchy blogposts, much to my shock. I always thought that bitchy posts are terrible and annoying because they reflect so badly of oneself, but I guess sometimes I like reading other people's smart-ass commentary too because hey, they are saying all the things that I myself thinks.

So here goes. A collection of all the categories of Facebook users, some more annoying, some less so.

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TYPES OF FACEBOOK USERS

1. The Navel Gazer

YES. It is right on top of my hate list. the navel gazer who posts supposedly deep and insightful reflections about their own lives. It is like, when you open your Faebook hoping to see cute cats like Waffles or Pancake (holy, people like to name their cats after food!) and you see this philosophical posts that usually begin like this:

It was truly a rewarding day today.

OR

Today I was on the bus...

OR

Today is the day where we get back our results...

Along those lines. They can spin deep reflections out of just a piece of toast or a cup of coffee. I will do a simple demonstration below:

"Today I was eating this piece of delicious toast when a sudden realization hit me. Life is so short. From being a beautiful, independent stalk of wheat amongst a million others to being reaped and crushed into silky smooth and fine flour is really a very short period of time. In the blink of an eye, you are now a piece of bread. Then you are bitten, masticated and relentlessly swallowed into an acidic hell, before you are cruelly ejected into - for the lack of finer expression - the toilet bowl. Then you are being thoughtlessly flushed down into the drain and washed into the sea. Life is short, the universe is wide and without boundaries. You are just a tiny peck of poop in the vast vast sea."

Yes. All that deep shit from a piece of toast.

The thing about navel gazers is that foremost, there is nothing remotely wrong about gazing at your bellybuttons. It becomes annoying and weird when you post all these emotional ~~paragraphs~~ novels onto Facebook. People are forced to gaze at your navel with you. And I swear that it is a wholly different experience when you are looking at another person's wrinkly belly.

Navel gaze and post all your philosophies on life and death in your own diary. Or your blog. Or just keep it in your head. Reflections always seem odder when made public.

2. The OOTD (Outfit Of The Day) Poster

I have no idea when #OOTD started becoming all the rage, but I had the feeling that if the Married Women's Property Act 1882 was the gateway to more equality, then the birth of #OOTD felt like the normalizing of self-obsession and narcissism.

I mean, before there was #OOTD, whenever someone wishes to announce to the world that he or she is wearing blah and blah, there would at least be an iota of hesitation and consideration: would it be too annoying? And I being too self-obsessed? OOTD seemed to preclude these problems by creating a trend, a fun "jump-on-the-bandwagon" thing that enables people to uninhibitedly share with the world whatever they are wearing.

It is like, dumping ice water on yourself without the #IceBucketChallenge is being a bit of an idiot, then doing it during the craze is being a noble idiot. Hallo, lesson learnt: the normalization of silly things do not make them less silly.

3. The Tagger

Like its name, the Tagger does one primary thing on Facebook, which is to tag loads and loads of people in their statuses, comments, photos....the lists goes on. A little bit of tagging is good, and probably very useful in getting your message across to the person intended, which hey, on the hindsight is kind of strange, since you are intending your message to the said person, yet you are simultaneously telling the 957 other people on your Facebook. Who will happen to glance at your message, probably heck it or roll their eyes, and continue their mechanical scrolling of the page.

Worst combination? The Tagger who is also the navel gazer. Which means that they literally pull you to stand next to them when they are staring (and admiring) their belly buttons in the mirror, and they don't give a hoot that you find their crusty belly buttons unsightly. Worst part is, they probably expect you to like their belly-button too, since yunno, comrade loyalty.

4. The "Irrelevant Caption" Adder (abbreviated ICA)

Ever taken a nice photo of the sunset? Post it to Facebook yet? Well, here comes the ICA.

The ICA usually functions in three easy peasy steps.

Take a photo of a common object, e.g. the sky, your table, smelly sneakers
Add a filter. Commonly used filters include monochrome and vintage effect
Write an irrelevant and "deep" commentary next to the photo, that has no link to the photo whatsoever.

Yep. That easy. Want a demonstration? Okay.

So imagine your friend, say a person called Ruth takes a picture of herself standing in the sunset. Then she adds this filter to make her photo look ostensibly professional. And her caption would be something like, "Love is so short, forgetting is so long." (I quoted Pablo Neruda on this, anyway.)

Which is like, completely irrelevant. But the said Ruth would expect you to make the non-existent links like: sunset means melancholy; hence her standing in the sunset means that she is being drenched in sadness; and inferring from the caption, she is suffering from a bout of depression because she has just been dumped by the person she likes.

If I ever comes across such a scenario, I think I would comment, "You are so short, your shadow is so long." At least it has some relevance to the photograph.

5. The Religious One

You heard it. The Religious One on your Faecbook can link every little thing that happens in life to God or Buddha or Allah (or the Powers that they believe in). And their statuses consists 90% of quotes from the Psalm, 5% praising the Lord and other 5% being perpetually grateful to everything around them.

Again, there is nothing wrong with having a lot of faith in one's religion. In fact, it is great that these people are such devout followers of their religions and I admire the trust and faith they put in their respective deities. The problem is once again with the surplus of sharing their faith to others that may be of a different religious faith. Or a freethinker, like moi.

6. The Clubber

I sometimes think that most of us have at least one friend like that. The one who always posts blurred and extremely pixelated photos of him/herself grooving to the club music. And getting drunk. Or hanging round some "chicks" or "hotties".

Favorite caption of the clubber?

"Out clubbing again tonite @location"

Short and to the point. Less words and more dancing.

7. The Sharer

The Sharer usually has few or no original posts of his or her own, and his entire wall page consists of an uninterrupted stretch of shares from different pages. Sometimes the sharer doesn't even use their own photo as a profile picture, but instead chooses to use a cat. Or a dog. Or a car.

Education? Nil. Work places? Nil.

The sharer likes to be mysterious and you are to decode him from the things that he share. Warning: the shares may be completely random and lacking in direction though.

8. The Game Inviter

Mousehunt. Farm Story. Bakery Story.

The Game Inviter sends his friends game invites that are far too many and far too often. See a notification on your Facebook? Open it excitedly only for it to read:

"ABC has invited you to play Texas Poker! 28 minutes ago."

OR

"ABC has sent you 100 coins on a-game-that-you-don't-play-and-never-will. Click now to accept!"

9. The Gym Goer

The Gym goer, or rather, the gym-whore feels that it is necessary for the whole world to know that he or she has been working out, and therefore make his/her grueling hours in the gym all worthwhile when the number of likes on the gym photo increases.

Alternatively, the gym goer makes everyone else feel fat, lazy and inadequate with a short yet striking 5 words:

"Going to the gym now."

10. Food (PHOTO) Sharer

The most dangerous, evil and cruel of them all. The food sharer. These people are also usually the ones who eat all kinds of heavy meal for supper and seldom gain an extra kilogram because of their crazily high metabolism.

Regardless of day or night, meal times or nap times, the food-photo sharer posts photos after photos of delicious looking, mouthwatering delicacies that make a full man hungry.

Nonetheless, these sharers are also usually cunningly accurate with their choice of share-times: at night, close to bedtime when you are just starting to feel a gnawing sensation in your tummy. Then, hey presto, creamy mushroom spaghetti! Prompts one to raid the fridge and eat yesterday's leftovers just to feel less sorry for oneself.

That's all I have for now! I realized that only part of these people are annoying haha, not all. I can't think of anymore for the moment, but if you find a particular category particularly irritating, feel free to share it with us and we might have Type of Facebook Users II! ^_^

Cheers and keep it scrolling!