Facebook – Okay, we get the picture. Life’s sucks, understandably so if your boss is a dick and your partner’s dumped you and your dog simultaneously pooed on your Manolo’s. Or perhaps you are full of internal sunshine and you see the positive in everything now that you are born again and feel elevated, all the time, every day. In both cases, no need to repetitively post all the hate or love on your status.
Twitter – Same as above. some followers might be interested in your every minute of every hour of your every day activities but please do consider the rest of us. See, it’s not only your friends that learn that you are on the bus on your way to work, that it is raining where you are, that your egg sandwich tastes good but your coffee less so. That you are at work, that you need to pee, that you will only tweet when your lunch break. That actually, why restrict yourself from tweeting, because your boss is a dick anyway. That you will tweet all through the work day (sigh).That you just made tea. Please, boregasm.
tumblr – Although I am guilty of this myself, in my defence I don’t call my tumblr a blog and I don’t expect people to subscribe to it via email or RSS. It’s an online creative dump for my personal use of online inspiration storage. If you are asking people to subscribe to your feed, then why not have a theme, like these great tumblogs by naturalbelle or ofanotherfashion. Themed tumblogs are on point.
Blogging – Unless you are a life & style blogger, photoblogger or magazine blogger etc. then you should never post a picture without at least one sentence that personalizes the post. There’s nothing like seeing the tweet of someone whose blog you read that says ‘new post – ‘imaginative thoughts of a serial reader’ only to click on it and be taken to a photo of some random dude reading a book on the train and no further explanation. Like Mwana Baa Afrika says in a comment on my ‘UK black blogs’ post, blogs are not newspapers, they don’t need to be updated just for the sake of it.
Skype – I don’t use skype enough to moan about other skypers. All I can offer is that if you have decided to pamper yourself with a facial mud mask and a hair treatment that involves a plastic bag, then stay away from skype. (Annie, I promise to follow my own advice next time )
Linked in – not for personal messages. not for personal messages. not for personal messages. not for personal messages. not for personal messages. Which leads me to:
Email – which is great for personal messages. However, when it comes to forwards, any information you pass on must be relevant to the recipient. Never send a feminist an email with these types of stupid jokes, for example. And if you support a good cause, as most of us do (right?), it’s only fair you ask yourself if I’m likely to donate to your neighbour’s endeavours to preserve butterflies in his garden, before hitting send. Don’t get it twisted, I absolutely love butterflies, and respect organisations like this and a butterfly inspired me to write this poem, so I am a potential butterfly funding type but #justsayin… Lastly, the most unforgivable, vile thing to do in terms of forwarding emails is waste valuable time with one of those selfish chain messages that will bring YOU good fortune if I send it to ten of MY friends and ME bad fortune if I don’t send it to ten of MY friends. Spare me, please.
We are all guilty of these on occasion, and some people actually manage to tweet all day long and remain interesting, or post photos that feel like they are part of the blog’s evolution, so all written with a pinch of salt. Do you have any ‘netiquette’ pet peeves?
One other thing that is annoying is slow websites, and I’m worried that mine is just that. I would appreciate if you could tell me if took a while to load my blog? I tried fixing this the other day and ended up deleting the site or crashing it or something, so now I’m too afraid to try again without first consulting someone who actually knows what the hell they are doing. If you have any tips on how to speed things up, please share?
Ha ha.. love this post, right on point. Nope your site isn’t slow.
Lets see how I can break the rules of comment posting:
I think this is an interesting post because I just had a cup of coffee and although it was strong, I had enough milk to balance the bitter taste. Have you been to New York? I hear they have the best coffee there..oh and bagels…I love bagels! You can buy my bagels here: http://www.bagels4u.com
no comment is better than a spam comment (:
LOL This is great, made me laugh a lot and rather timely as I have just had a bad interaction with a digital oxymoron. Also I have never quite grasped the point of tumblr so thanks for clearing that up.
That’s right let it all out!!
I get your point.
I feel when it comes to digital etiquette it is quite tricky, sometimes when we complain we forget how the timeline (twitter) of the person we are complaining about looks like.
The majority of the type of tweets you pay attention to will in some way reflect on what you do say unless you are just so strong minded …
Or we forget to ask ourselves why this person is tweeting the things they do …
If I was to pick one then I fall under the tea twitters, I love tea of all flavours and I mention the ones i like simply to inform other tea lovers out there about it, to show those who want to know me that I am a tea person as opposed to alcoholic drinking person just so they know incase we meet up sometime and I get dragged to a bar, to show who the tbr/hob girl is … or to just say something that is far far far away from my personal life. I mean i’d rather mention a tea flavour than mention how my boyfriend is so fit I just love starring at him LOL ( lame example but … )
Everyone will always have something that annoys them regarding all these social networks, what interests one person will most definitely bore someone else. A might love informative tweets, B might love funny pointless tweets, and C might love judgemental tweets and really the only way to stop being irritated by these twitters is to either un-follow them or mute them if you want to be polite.
I personally get irritated when all one does is advertise a product repeatedly or constantly re-tweets what people say about their products I mean I might be following you for support or because I want to be updated once in awhile but I most importantly want to learn who the person/people are behind the brand or the background or even what goes on backstage.
If you are your brand I am more impressed and will buy into the product than if you just keep mentioning the brand especially if its a buy or die thing … I start to feel unappreciated, cheated and threatened as a customer LOL (if that makes sense).
I am surprised you didn’t make a comment about pointless re-tweeters that don’t re-tweet as a follow up to what they had previously mentioned or a useful/interesting tweets but just a random mid way conversation that is not even funny.
I feel these people really just want their group of friends to follow them and are not on twitter to network.
I am only talking about twitter because I have left facebook, because I feel tumblr is pointless and demands too much and sidetracks you without you realising so I wont talk about it.
Emails I totally agree with you, I once blasted everyone for sending me dumb forwards some were not happy by my outburst but I was happy when it stopped so there!! :-p
I think to be really considerate then all we’ll ever say is good morning and good night and repeat information that is already everywhere online, indoors or the outdoors. The amount of repeated information I read at a go is just so repulsive I feel embarrassed for some bloggers if they cant talk about something other than what everyone in their field is talking about THIS IS one of the reasons I LOVE and READ YOUR BLOG! it is different it doesnt follow a blog trend, it is intellectual, informative and most especially it has purpose, direction and follows your theme and supports a cause and most importantly it is beneficial to you and your readers.
I really dont know why I always leave such long comments :-s I hope i’ve made sense.
And your site loads okay for me.
Also this picture has got to be the funniest picture ever!!!!!!!! xo
OMG! I need to stop leaving comments! What is all of that!!!!!!! I am over comfortable on blogs lol! Sorry
I hate (and yes that is a strong word that I don’t use often so you know I really mean it) people who just adopt all the social media with no idea why they are using it. Each type has a use. I really can’t stand twitter because of it. Too much abuse. I can see it’s uses but I cannot bring myself to create an account because of how celebrities who want to express their diatribes in 140 do it in about 10 tweets and even worse the drivel that people want to share because they are desperate to connect with anyone at any level (this is a terribly cynical view I know and I am sorry). The whole point is to give bite-sized information. And you already gave me a lovely shout out with my views on blogs. I am a blogger because I can’t give stuff out to the potential masses in bite sized chunks and when I need to I do it on Facebook and only subject my friends who actually want to hear a little bit about what I’m doing every now and again through my status updates. I don’t understand tumblr so I don’t use it.
However, when used properly, I think that digital media has afforded us a way to express and connect that is unprecedented and is so exciting to watch. And I am glad that people out there are trying to figure out how to do this. If only they would find there way here to ensure proper netiquette ;).
And I want to thank you again for featuring me on your blog both in this post and on your sidebar. Google analytics says that you are responsible for 10% of my traffic this month 🙂
Amen, my sister! Amen! I’m re-posting and re-tweeting this. 🙂
ahahaaha reason #154673 why i love you Big Sis!!
i am sure YOU KNOWWWWWWWWW how i feel about some of these.
I am not on twitter because i just could not get past all the “uninteresting” things that people want me to be interested in.
I never really quite get why some who are on there are even on there in the first place. You could barely string together a facebook status message what business do you have on Twitter? People sure love their bible quotes don’t they? we are a generation of quoters, don’t have anything worthwhile to say, insert a bible quote, get a few likes and all is well with the world.
I left facebook last year after having it since ’03 because i honestly just wasn;t interested in what most people had to offer , what they had to say, who they know i couldn’t care less and i couldn’t keep pretending i did. don’t get me started on the stupid chainmails, i am not a teamplayer as it is, so of course i am going to break the chain by not responding and doing exactly the opposite of that which would bring me good luck.
i think Tumbler is reflective of today’s ‘Me Too’ culture ….with all this social media, people have become ‘Inspiration’ horders,everything and anyone is inspiring and wants to be, so what do we do? we find a place to dump all that shit even when it has nothing to do with your life. I agree with MBA, i too hate when people adopt social media without really knowing Why they have it.
you have a blog but you don’t know why you have it. i honestly don’t think you should blog if you don’t have any opinion of your own.
it doesn’t have to be interesting even, but at least have an opinion, about something. Do if for you not because everyone is doing it.frankly if you can’t keep it up then you had no business in the first place.
subscribing to every and all the social media is keeping up with the Jones’ in the very worst way. the idea being that if you don’t have all of these things , you are not cool enough.
the redefinition of cool in today’s copy and paste world is scary In a cynical way i think it is producing more people who need validation in everything and anything, the desire to connect to anything and anyone drives it, why else would you tweet about every single thing that happens in your life , in real time, all the time. it has to be exhausting, all that sharing and connecting.
the older generation caught on. they think they are savvy because they have twitter or facebook lol now i am not trying to undermine or dismiss social medias outright, they are quite fantastic and great. i am just not sure that the idea is to adopt them all and let it take over our lives. i just think that people are less self reflective these days because they are soo tuned into every social outlet and ‘connected’ to all their social network and they are not taking the time to ask the simple question: do i need all of these social interaction and mediums to be relevant.
In a world where ‘like’ is just as valued as an actual opinion, it is no wonder we have come to this point. where retweeting and rebloging and regurgitating is an all inclusive sport.All this following , what does it all mean? when you can’t explain why you ‘like’ something or why u subscribe to it, what is that ‘like’ worth?
personally, i choose the mediums that work for me and drop the rest, just because it is there, doesn’t mean i should be on it.
i am gonna stop ranting now before it gets out of hand.lol
Thanx for the tips! But this list maybe me realize even more about how I need to unplug myself from the social netowrking some…lol