Long ago, when Snapchat stories became a thing, everyone went ballistic. Now it’s pretty much an everyday occurrence, people posting 1-10 second long videos of their days, what they’re eating, who they’re hanging out with, something funny they saw and so on. Then Instagram went out and added stories and most people’s reactions were in the range of “What? That’s weird, but I guess it’s tolerable” and some people have even started to use Insta-Stories on a somewhat regular basis. But, recently Facebook has added stories to their site and let me tell you; that is the last straw. Facebook has been trying so hard to regain its younger user population, since—no offense—parents and grandparents have taken over, but they’re completely missing the mark here. If Facebook really wanted to win back it’s Twitter using, Instagram scrolling crowd, they’re probably better off dropping the hashtags and bringing back some of the real reasons we all used Facebook so much
1. Poking people
Before God invented Tinder, there was poking. Poking your crush was the easier way to let them know you were interested. And because they probably had like 50 other pokes, they just poked every single one back without giving it any second thought. And before you knew it you were in a poke war. And your entire relationship would consist of *poke* *poke* *poke* until one of you stopped poking back. Tragic. You probably also poked your friends to annoy the shit out of them and that’s something I think even people today can get behind. So what are you waiting for Facebook?
2. TBH statuses
Along with TBH’s there’s the “truth is” the “rate” the “why what’s up” and more. Granted we know we can still do these. We still have the ability to create a status and post on other people’s walls, but what we’d really like is to go back in time to a point where it wasn’t considered weird and it was a regular occurrence. Nothing boosts one’s self-esteem like a post on your wall telling you how pretty you are and how you should definitely hang out sometime or totally talk more or a post giving you a rating of 10000/10.
3. Showing you when they became friends with people
For the same reasons people still get angry about the fact that Snapchat took away the ability to see another person’s best friend, if you went to someone’s wall you could see every single time someone got a new friend and that made stalking your crush—or anyone really—a whole heck of a lot easier. Facebook was the OG stalker sight, and if you think about it, it was much easier to stalk back then than it is nowadays. Who really wants to risk double tapping 76 weeks back on someone’s Insta? Not me.
4. Bumper Stickers/Flair
The equivalent to decorating your laptops and water bottles with stickers today, it was our way of personalizing our profiles. Today Facebook is so dull. I mean okay, sure you have a cover photo, and yeah it’s nice that you can say how you’re feeling in a status, but how the heck will anyone know anything about who I really am without a button with a picture of waffles on it chilling on my profile page????
5. Showing your family members on your profile
Because let’s face it, none of the people you listed back then were actually related to you. You didn’t actually have 17 siblings all with different last names than you. They were your best friends, and we loved showing off our best friends on our profile. It was the next step after we stopped listing our MySpace best friends.
6. Games
Words With Friends, Draw Something, Trivia Crack, oh my! We probably had 12 different games going at any given moment. And though we weren’t really using Facebook the way it was intended, we were at least still logging on pretty frequently to play people back, even in the middle of class. Now that’s commitment. Maybe, just maybe, if Facebook brought back those games it would see a resurgence of log-ins.
7. Notes
Notes: The perfect place to write and save inside jokes with your best friends or answer those questions that no one could really care less about, like “What color shirt are you wearing right now?” or “Who was the last person you texted?”. Again this was mostly just so you could tag your best friends in them. Facebook was literally the digital equivalent of peeing all over your best friends to mark your territory and we loved it. Now it’s a competition about how many stupid videos and articles can you tag your best friend in the comments.
8. Pages about weird things that you like
Another way to express yourself: liking thousands of Facebook pages that were #relatable and funny. How else was anyone going to know that I, too, liked going out of my way to step on a crunchy leaf or that I also *waves at somebody* Oh my god they weren’t waving at me!! *dies*. It’s so much more difficult to get to know people these days. We actually have to talk to them or something. Gross.
9. Pictures where you tagged your friends as different things
The nerd, the cute one, the jock, the tall one, the couple (and by couple of course we mean the two kids we drooled over who would walk to class holding hands), the singer, the bff (virtual peeing, all over), the one with pretty hair, the class clown, the best guy friend (friend-zoning people since ’09) and more.
