10 Mistakes Your Relatives Will Make On Facebook (If They Haven’t Already)
I love my family. They send me cute Christmas cards on my birthday, stuff me with delicious food (sometimes, forcefully), and keep me grounded by constantly reminding me how single I am every holiday season. However, as much as I appreciate their presence in real life, I could do without their presence on my Facebook newsfeed. It’s not that I don’t like hearing from them and staying updated on their lives. It’s just that they use these sites without taking the time to understand any of the social rules that govern them, which results in a number of frustrating mistakes that you can’t do anything to prevent:
1) Posting on their own wall when trying to address you.
I can understand if grandparents do this once or twice. When I first signed up for Facebook, I used to respond to friends through status updates to avoid having to click through multiple pages to get to their wall. (I was fourteen. My attention span was short.) But when this starts happening five or six times a week and you start receiving angry phone calls about how you’re disrespecting your elders by ignoring the mass of questions you never received, you know it’s time for a Facebook intervention.
2) Commenting on pictures of you that someone else posted thinking that they’re yours.
“What a hottie! Is this ur new BF? He looks like ur grandfather when he was young. Cuter tho! LOL!” Comments like this are moderately okay when you’re the one that uploaded the photo and you can quickly untag that guy that is most definitely not your boyfriend, but when the photo was uploaded by one of your classmates that you’ve only spoken to once and you’re powerless to prevent this embarrassing spectacle from unfolding, “moderately okay” turns into “the worse thing to ever happen in the history of time, including that time you threw up in the middle of science class.”
3) Commenting on every picture of you seconds after they’re posted.
Not even seconds, milliseconds. The speed at which relatives can “like” my pictures makes me think they’re sitting in front of their computer screens waiting for my updates, which is a level of Facebook stalking that I didn’t think existed.
4) Tagging you in every post.
Facebook’s tagging feature was invented to improve communication between friends and family, but it has quickly turned into a way for your relatives to dominate your Facebook wall and create the impression that you have no other friends. What else are they supposed to think when they find your Facebook wall plastered with dozens of cute animals and game requests, all from the same person?
5) Calling it “the Facebook.”
Grandma used “the Google” to find “the Facebook” so she could see pictures of “the Family” and “the cute boy from Target” that she saw on “the Ellen Degeneres.” Then, “the Niece” turned off “the glowing picture box” so “the Grandma” could never use “the Facebook” again. “The end.”
6) Posting pictures that are so blurry, they look like they were taken in a cave.
The caption says “Uncle Bill and I grabbing a few drinks at our favorite restaurant” but all you can see is a hodgepodge of shapes reminiscent of Dali’s early cubist works. Once you start scrolling through the album, you realize that, not only does every picture said relative has uploaded looks like this, but you seem to be the only one who notices that something is wrong. “Great picture, Rosie! You guys look great!” your aunt says, as you scratch your head in confusion and try to find your grandmother in the photo.
7) Letting autoposts run wild.
In the future, when government organizations are scrolling through the Facebook pages of the deceased, they will inevitably stumble upon the pages of our relatives and conclude that their primary purpose in life was to keep the world updated on Candy Crush and FarmVille. If you’re over the age of 55, Facebook should automatically turn those pesky autoposts off for you, if only to protect the sanity of its other users.
8) Telling personal and embarrassing stories about your childhood.
No, grandma, nobody wants to see a picture of me pooping in the bathtub when I was two. Stop. What are you doing. Don’t tell them that story. Why are you typing all of this out? Don’t you have things to do? Why are you including those details? WHY ARE YOU TAGGING MY FRIENDS? GRANDMA NO.
9) Typing in all caps or using punctuation wrong.
“HI SWEETHEART. I HOPE YOU HAVE THE GREATEST BIRTHDAY EVER AND THAT YOUR MOM GIVES YOU THE COOKIES I MADE LAST NIGHT. ALSO WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW THE DOCTORS SAID MY SCREAMING WILL STOP IN A FEW DAYS. IT’S A SIDE EFFECT OF MY BLOOD PRESSURE MEDICATION. LOVE YOU TO PIECES.”
10) Sharing inspirational pictures from Facebook groups every second.
You can never have too many pictures of kittens dangling from trees or pictures of clouds layered with inspirational quotes like “Today is the next day of the rest of your life” or “Reach for the moon so if you miss, you will land among the stars” or “YOLO.” By which I mean, you definitely can have too many pictures of these things. Three pictures a second is too many. Two pictures an hour is too many. One picture a year is too many. Cut it out.