Yeah, it used to be you only had to deal with this once a year, when you opened their Christmas newsletter. ;-)

Oh sure, it bothers me. I had to block a high school friend who I otherwise enjoy hanging out with (on the rare occasion I see her every few years) because she's just such a braggart. The final straw for me was when she posted something like, I just reached my goal of making six figures, awesome! Really? Salary info on Facebook, really?

other people's lives stopped bothering me a long time ago. but I might have overdone it I think cause you need at least a little insecurity to have ambition for something better in your own life

It's a few serial offenders who really get under my skin. Why do I let them? I dunno, there's just a certain type of post where bragging is disguised as innocent sharing ("Re-reading War and Peace for the umpteenth time. Man I love this book") that really rankles.

(This post was inspired by one person's particularly obnoxious expressions of his excellence, good taste, and thriving social circle.)

I'm actually concerned that I do stuff like that from time to time. I look over my facebook page every so often, pretending that I'm a random acquaintance and seeing what I would think of me. I've caught a couple of humblebrags. Not proud of that.

Oh, and I have a couple of obnoxious brags about my awesome kid, but I tend to label that "obnoxious brag": and go from there. (hoping that it mitigates it a bit)

I hate all the passive-aggressive stuff from attention whores more than the bragging.

You know the kind of thing, all that "people wonder why I don't want anything to do with certain people but when they treat me like they do they leave me with no choice. I hope they can live with themselves, if you're a real friend you'll stand by me.", all that sort of shit.

I have a couple of FB acquaintances who do this regularly, and it's nothing but attention-seeking to which I never respond.

The one getting to me lately is the friend who, after months of complaining about how much she hates her job, got laid off in November. Then she complained about being unemployed - when I saw her at a party getting intentionally drunk in a focused and angry way, she said "this is going to be the worst Christmas ever...I had to cash out some bonds that were gifts from family just to pay my rent! We have nothing!" Her husband earns very little, another subject of frequent complaint. Meanwhile, daily on Facebook she checks in and posts from pubs, restaurants, and coffee shops about what she's eating (and spending) there. My sympathy for her predicament is done. If you're in financial trouble, you have all my sympathy. If you're eating out once or twice a day every day but finding your well-under-$1000/mo rent an issue, I'm a lot less supportive.

I unfollowed just about everyone who does the interpersonal drama thing Senyar mentions. Life's too short. I lost my scorecard.

I'm actually concerned that I do stuff like that from time to time. I look over my facebook page every so often, pretending that I'm a random acquaintance and seeing what I would think of me. I've caught a couple of humblebrags. Not proud of that.

I'm not sure either. I totally know what you mean, and because of it I stop myself from posting stuff that is too much of a downer, but also too much of an "I'm having a great moment!" upper. Too heady and hifalutin, but also too trashy and silly. We're stuck with the reality that our great moments coincide with others' miserable moments, our awesome delights are also others' grating bugbears.

In the end, what the heck are you supposed to say? I'd just like to relax and be a little more authentic. But FB does this weird thing of putting you on all the stages of your life at once, and if you're playing to one crowd, you're probably irritating another. Which means if you want to irritate no one, you have to retreat to the bland and unremarkable or unimpeachably embraceable. Another reason why it's such an imperfect broadcast medium.

I have a close friend who also happens to be a total drama queen and writes attention begging posts like 'finally happy' or 'deserved it' which I completely ignore.
They do catch the attention of my other friends though, which is annoying because then they ask me if she is ok and what she meant and I have to explain how to ignore that crap over and over.
To me that is much worse than the incessant " my kid is a genius" updates or the brags about work. Easier to ignore when straightforward, it seems.

I worry that since I've had a baby I've been posting too many pictures of him and status updates related to him. I promised myself that I wouldn't be one of those parents, yet I may be.

Big yahs on Miko's spendy friend with no money. I sincerely hope she has a larger year in 2012.

Facebook to me is a high school hall photo collage; and I treat it like a public blog which it is. I avoid the attention crowd; but I post and comment on my stuff and friends stuff.

If I had $5 for every pic of my baby; I would have around $200 more dollars after the last 48 hours alone. Poor kids are all going to grow up FLASH FLASH FLASH blinded.

I do have one friend I occasionally roll my eyes at. Her updates are consistently self-congratulatory remarks about how VERY accomplished/talented/stylish she is despite working ONE ZILLION HOURS a day.

But she was always like that. It's not Facebook; it's her. I love her despite her swaggering bluster (and sometimes because of it). That's why we're friends*: I love her, even with all her foibles, and she loves me, even with all mine. At least when she shamelessly brags on FB, I have the luxury of rolling my eyes oh-so-hard without hurting her feelings.

Oh, and I have a couple of obnoxious brags about my awesome kid

As a childless person, I LOVE FB for this stuff. Just last week I got to meet a friend's 9-month-old baby for the first time --- but I've been glued to the FB photos and videos and stories since she was born.

There are certainly days when I can't handle it, when it seems like everyone but me has an adorable kid or a sweet-smelling new baby or a cute baby-bump, but those are the days when I either close the tab or silently hide a baby-displaying friend for a few days.

I have two drama-stirring people whom I've silently hidden. They can still interact in other ways: post to my page, play games, comment, or I can go to their pages to check in with them --- but I don't get their [inflammatory political screeds/drunken late-night updates] in my daily feed. It's much nicer for me, and I think it's the FB equivalent of screening their calls for my convenience.

*I'm using "friends" in the old-timey way here: actual friends. I can't handle the great big list of "friends" that many people maintain on FB; my FB contacts are all face-to-face friends or family members.

We're stuck with the reality that our great moments coincide with others' miserable moments, our awesome delights are also others' grating bugbears.

Agreed. And even more than that: there are ways in which my life is wonderful. There are ways in which my life is rough. Generally, I choose to focus on the wonderful if I can, and to focus on the positive changes when I can't.

That means my FB page (like my everyday conversation) is mostly about the things that make me happy (my loving husband, my nice dinner or awesome new boots, my sweet niece spending a whole day with me, the great new marriage equality law) or daily annoyances and inconveniences (especially if my local friends share them, like when my whole peninsula was on boil-water notice this week) or links to ways to effect positive political or social change (links to articles, volunteer opportunities, and benefits).

I tend not to talk on FB about about larger, ongoing challenges like my chronic pain, my anxiety about money, my unemployment, my struggle to maintain a positive self-image, my sorrow to be childless. And I assume the same is true for many of my friends: that we're all struggling to experience our happiness and effect positive change despite the sorrow that can keep crashing in.

Is the expectation with those people that you "converse" with them by tooting your own horn just as loud as them? Or are they even listening? I'm never quite sure.

I dunno, fleacircus, but that seems to me to be true of all kinds of people. The people who endlessly complain: do they expect you to complain right back, to commiserate with them, to ignore them, or what? In person, by email, on the phone, or on FB, I don't know what response they expect.

I don't worry too much about it because I'm just my goofy* self; I'm not interested in sculpting a public persona in response to their complaints any more than I would in response to their self-aggrandizing.

*Yeeeah, after I wrote about my purportedly-typical FB postings, I went and checked out my page. Ooops, I utterly mischaracterized my usage. It's all goofy stuff: links to Bon Iver fan fic, tagged for my niece; a link to an auction of a labradorite monkey-face ring that is Obviously Haunted; the perpetuation of a friendly argument a friend and I had about Prometheus.

I too am annoyed by the stuff miko and senyar describe. I don't find people's posts about their kids to be annoying, nor am I bothered by updates like Elsa describes.

Social networks just create such weird, new phenomena, you know? There's something about the way people share on FB that gives the annoyingness its edge. So many things collide. (1) there's the fact that YOU KNOW how often they're logging into Facebook and actually expending a lot of effort and time to post this stuff; (2) there's what I consider a lack of dignity in an individual being this invested in a corporate, ad-based content system (YOUR content is making someone else very wealthy); (3) there's the fact that some users seem to be missing the part of the personality that edits and filters things that seem like bragging or over sharing; (4) there's the dimension of the problem where they seem to be living with an eye toward how it would appear on Facebook.

I also see from time to time, an adult exhaustively cataloging their reading and music tastes in exquisite detail on their "About Me" page, and more often than not, the choices are refined, niche artists and writers that seem calculated to demonstrate how sophisticated this person is, how carefully "curated" their tastes in reading and music are, and it just annoys me as a display of peacocking.

My annoyance is such that, when I'm tempted to post something, I often find myself in elaborate conversation with myself, asking "would this post give people ammo to say I THINK I'M CUTE?" "Would this make it seem that I THINK I'M FUNNY?" "Would this come across as sly bragging ?" "would this basically seem like a pathetic attempt to be funny?" The end result of these cogitations is that I generally do not post.

Some people in my circle do this thing that is very hard to describe in general terms, but is the sort of frivolity unbecoming an adult, at least weird to broadcast to your work colleagues. And it's adults doing things with consistency and weird obsessiveness and application. They fixate on this one thing and do it over and over again, series of posts written according to some twee formula that is ... bizarre.

I post a lot, mostly re-posts of political commentary, and some pretty pictures. Pictures of my son, and occasional updates. I enjoy seeing posts from Miko, Elsa, Eideteker, and a few others. FB is not to be taken too seriously. (My sister got on my case for an atheist re-post, and I was all "srsly, it's just fb, chill")

Also, sending {{hug}} to Elsa, who is awesome.

Also, sending {{hug}} to Elsa, who is awesome.

Aw, I'm doin' fine, theora55; those things are just examples of the ongoing downer background stuff that I don't usually talk about on FB. It's nothing unusual or particular to me.

But I'm not turning down a hug, especially from a powerhouse hugger like you. Right back atcha! {{{theora55}}}