Top 15 things you should never do on Facebook

Written by James Rivington

Be less annoying to your friends on Facebook by following these guidlines

People do things on Facebook that they’d never dream of doing in real life:

Love them or hate them, social networking sites are here to stay. Facebook and MySpace are among the most popular destinations on the web. And even though they can be extremely annoying, there is one inescapable fact: the most irritating thing about Facebook is the 100m-strong army of people who use it.

When was the last thing you looked at your feed without someone posting an embarrassing picture, or someone else saying something irritating in their status update?

Here are the top 15 things you should never do on Facebook or MySpace:

1. Use Facebook mail instead of proper email
Are you silly? When you Facebook mail me, I have to log into my real email to find that I then have to go and log into my Facebook account to read and reply to your message. If you’ve got my real email address, please use it.

2. Add old friends and then forget about them
This is the biggest social networking crime of them all. How many times has it happened? You haven’t seen someone for 20 years; you vaguely recognise their name but not their face. They add you as a friend on Facebook and then after you accept them, you never hear from them again.

3. Adding people you don’t even know
It’s one thing to add an old friend and then never speak to them. It’s another to add anyone whose name you kind of vaguely sort of recognise. It’s like that old man in the pub who slaps everyone on the back as if they were old pals, when in actual fact he has no friends, largely because of this habit.

4. Adding single-serving holiday friends
Some people just don’t understand that the exchanging of email addresses at the end of a holiday is just a social ritual and is absolutely not an invitation to add you to Facebook and then turn up unannounced at your house three months later.

5. Accepting friend invitations from people you don’t know
It’s one thing to complain about irritating people adding you on Facebook, but if you accept those invites, you’ve only got yourself to blame. If you scan through your Facebook friends list, you’ll doubtless find a handful of people in there you barely know. It’s a horrible realisation – like when you suddenly realise your hand is resting on a knob of someone else’s chewing gum underneath a desk.

6. Update Facebook profile when you’re supposedly ill
How many times have we seen it? Someone calls in sick in the morning and then updates their Facebook profile minute-by-minute throughout the day, documenting a day of ice cream, chips, video games and jumping on the bed. Get dressed and get to work you lazy hoodwink, or else you’ll probably be fired. And it’d be your own fault for adding your boss to be your Facebook friend.

7. Write on a wall instead of communicating privately
The driving force behind the success of Facebook is… vanity. People love the idea that others are watching what they’re doing. Tell me this: for what reason would you invite someone to a private party by writing on their wall, other than to show off to all the people on their friends list who you don’t want to come? It just makes you look like a tit, so don’t do it.

8. Moan in your Facebook status
The most annoying thing that people do on Facebook is to spray their walls with vanity-filled drivel, by posting self-indulgent awfulness in their status updates. “Kerry is sorry how it ended but it had to be done. I love you and will miss you, and I hope you can apologise one day”. Oh sod off. If you’ve got something to say to someone, say it. Don’t post it on your wall because no one else is interested, and people just think you’re a prat.

9. Other irritating status updates
No, “Dave is” is not an acceptable status update, nor is it original or in any way clever. “Dave just is…” is equally as inexcusable. And “Dave is Dave is Dave” is downright taking the piss. Oh, and song lyrics are also a no-no. “Sandra was happy in the haze of a drunken hour, but heaven knows she’s miserable now” will impress people about the same amount as Morrissey’s saggy, miserable face.

10. Upload drunken pictures the morning after
Have a little common sense. If you go out for a big one on a Wednesday night, posting humiliating, drunken photos of your friends on Thursday morning is a recipe for disaster. Because when I call in sick at 9am, the last thing I want my boss to say is: “I’ve seen the pictures of you crawling in the gutter last night. I’m not amused or impressed, now get to work!”

11. Joining ridiculous chain-mail groups
Why do people insist on joining groups such as “On the X of May, everyone has to panic buy carrots”? Come on people, how stupid are you? There’s one group on Facebook devoted to nullifying the vegetarian moral crusade, and it’s called: “For every animal you don’t eat, I’m going to eat three”. That’s a good group name. “I think Ryan Seacrest is the best presenter ever” is not.

12. Starting said groups
Enough said.

13. Lazy grammar and spelling mistrakes
Reading Facebook is like perusing a six-year olds’ English copybook. Come on, people: ‘Your’ is ‘your’. ‘You are’ is ‘you’re’. It really isn’t hard to get that little one right. And understanding the difference between there, their and they’re surely isn’t too much of a challenge?

14. Upload photos to Facebook and deleting originals
Uploading photos to Facebook can be a very handy way of sharing your holiday snaps. But for the love of God, don’t lose your originals. Facebook is terrible at compressing and resizing images – it turns your 14MP panoramas into 14KB monstrosities. Facebook is not a suitable repository to store your precious photos!

15. Inviting me to be a Zombie Pirate Snot Monster
Please don’t do that ever ever again

38 thoughts on “Top 15 things you should never do on Facebook

  1. Rosie

    Shouldn’t that be “a six-year oldโ€™s English copybook” instead of “a six-year oldsโ€™ English copybook”?

  2. Cheryl

    After reading the rules, written I’m guessing to attempt to keep people from doing all the incredibly stupid, boring, cruel things they do anyway in real life, I’ve decided I really don’t need a Facebook presence.

    No matter what kind of good thing people come up with, there are always two dozen total asses waiting in the wings to tear it down. No thanks.

  3. Joan

    Thanks so much for the tip. I saw this linked from another blog. I appreciate your work. My mom always get suckered into making internet mistakes. ๐Ÿ™‚

  4. Harmed

    neither witty nor useful.

    #16 when you can’t get noticed on Facebook don’t write an article about why you failed to get noticed on facebook. <–also not witty, but true like yours

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  6. Steve

    One more thing…never post something childish, derogatory, etc about another person using their full name, i.e.; “Mary Little Lamb smells like poop”. Potential employers may (and do) see those posts and they may decide not to hire Mary based upon what has been said about her, even in jest.

  7. Lina

    My personal pet peeve? It’s people who constantly post updates about whatever game they’re playing. No one cares if you joined YoVille or found a wild turkey!

  8. Dan

    I agree with everything except the email thing. I don’t have to log into my email to find out I have a facebook email. I don’t even use regular email for my friends. I just use facebook enough that i’ll get the message on facebook before I’d read an email about it.

  9. jonny

    Yeah, quite a lot of this is stolen from the ‘meaning of liff’ book by douglas adams. And although those quotes are literally copied and pasted, they arent as funny

  10. tiff

    This article is ridiculous. you’re talking about grammar and spelling mistakes but you spelled the world realize wrong every time you used it. and if i gave someone my email at a party i would want them to add me on facebook, its called not being a jerk. you sound like a pompous butt to me and im glad i dont have any friends like you.

  11. Jenny Davenport

    It never fails to amaze me how many people there are that insists others do as they do, or not at all. I’m fairly new to facebook, but the joy I found in it, is that everyone who is on Your facebook network are either friends, or friends of friends. I stop there. I have reservations about all the apps that want persmission to “collect info about you and your friends” so it can do it’s job. Common, we have comon sense here. We know it’s like a telemarketer system. One idea that I thought was great was that everyone could relax after a day of ” having to be politically or gramatically correct” and just type away and undwind. I don’t agree with whining, but hey, if you can’t whine to a friend who can you whine to. Others may have some good ideas for you anyway. So all you watch dogs of the world, leave facebook alone, and although you have a right to critisize, we have a right to be free and relaxed to the point of a few typos don’t have to be corrected , because our friends understand. It’s like texting, which I hate. I make mistakes because I dont have ” keyboard” texting and it’s time consuming to go back and make it ” right”. Blahhh blahh.

  12. Babelogue

    I'm assuming the writer of this post is British. In which case “realise” is the correct spelling.

  13. Victoria

    You're a bit of a hypocrite aren't you?
    Horrible article by the way and in no way clever or funny. It was really you whining about things that bug you. If you don't like facebook that much just don't use it. End of story and nobody would have had to read this.

  14. addmeonfbmayt

    srry mate, but you kind of sound like you get angry at everything. so somebody says 'your a frutcake' instead of 'you're a frutcake', or spells fruitcake wrong, doesn't mean u have to make a blog about how annoying u think dat is. anyway i think sometimes the way ppl spell on fb sorta shows ther real personality, someting like dat, i dono maybe thats just me. maybe some ppl (like me) are jus lazy, i dono :

    ish no big deal mayt!

  15. Salvatore

    The tips are nice, but ultimately isn't it just up that person. An if you are or know somebody like that people including you can block all there nonsense.

  16. richard leong

    One more to add. Stop posting bible verses on your status update everyday or every other day. It’s annoying or you’re trying to be some kind of online minister.

  17. kij

    And understanding the difference between there, their and theyโ€™re surely isnโ€™t too much of a challenge?

    That doesn’t need a question mark.

  18. Daniele

    does all of that really even matter, especially spelling mistakes! no one really cares about all of these:DD

Comments are closed.