6 New Options We Should Have On Facebook
Facebook has brought us into a social world more interconnected than it’s ever been. With its ongoing growth comes many things, like being able to know what the person who sat next to you in seventh grade science class had for lunch, whose one-eyed cat just died, or how you’re faring with people you unhealthily compare yourself to. That being said, every few years Facebook adds a few novel features to change things up. I thought about what these new features could be: here are six new options I’d like to see integrated into it to make my experience on it all around more enjoyable.
Note: If my happiness truly was my aim here, I’d probably just deactivate my account, but I’m not quite ready.
1. Photo Permission: Many of times you’ll get tagged in pictures that you seriously can’t understand what you were doing that day. All the money on clothing, trips to the gym, kale consumption, and playing with your hair in the mirror, and that’s what you present?
What you can always do is untag yourself, but the photo will still exist in the vulnerable internet ether, killing your dreams with The One if they were to ever innocently stumble upon it.
So, what I’m advocating for is the permission slip: do you allow this picture to exist?” and if the answer is no, it should be deleted instantaneously. And I want to hear that sound the macbook makes when you empty the recycle bin, too.
2. The No: Somebody went bold and wrote directly on your wall: an attempt to catch up, it seems, except the post isn’t that funny and you don’t know how to respond. Knowing how much ego-swallowing it takes for someone you don’t know too well to make the write-on-wall move, you’re almost obligated to respond with something, unless you’re fine with coming off like a penis. What I would like is the No—something to say I got your point, I’ll give you a call, but I don’t want a video of sea lions.
3. The Dislike Button: Cynics like myself have had an insatiable desire for the Dislike button for several years. If what’s preventing its existence is Facebook’s fear of people potentially abusing it, then the concern is absolutely valid. I’d personally be a total dislike slut, voting down on every Beyonce article that goes viral or anybody’s new job.
Here’s one conflict that comes into mind: would it be used as a dislike, as in disinterest, to the post? Or would it more closely resemble a true dislike, as in unhappy. Say, for example, somebody makes a ‘RIP Grandma’ post. Do you ‘like’ it so as to show solidarity, or do you vote down, since you, of course, didn’t like seeing grandma die, lest you knew her personally and she served terrible food to you as a boy. A very precipitous and vital inquiry never to be answered, I suppose.
4. The ‘This is the Person’ Note: Eventually, since Facebook pries on knowing your favorite books, TV shows, movies, favorite color and probably the size of your shaft, it should be able to know who it was you just met. No, that hot girl you met at the bar is definitely not this forty five year old plump lady holding a yellow cat. This searching process can, at times, go from a slightly invasive search to an all out creepy technological onslaught, bringing up all sorts of questions about yourself. What I’m imagining is a feature that allows me to type in the person’s first name, whatever else I might know about them, and Facebook immediately going: “This is who you are looking for.”
5. To Like a Like: Sometimes I won’t necessarily like something, but I’ll like how someone else likes that thing—and I want to like that like, not the thing itself. You follow?
6. The Punch: Something to slap me in the face when I’m on it: I don’t know what’s going to happen to people, because we used to be biological beings who lived and did things and talked to people, but now were just these creatures who develop bad posture by staring at statuses and pictures too long. If the world’s going down, I don’t want to be a part of it. That’s why I’d like to be slapped in the face when I’m on it for more than three or four minutes, which is probably what you want to do to me if you’re still reading this.