Anyone who has spent any amount of time on social media has found different kinds of posts and posters that annoy them. No matter the platform, there are users that do things time and again that get on the nerves of others on that social network. And in a time when many people around the world are limiting their exposure to the outside world and spending drastically more time indoors than is normal, social media usage has increased and it’s a sure bet that annoyances with those platforms have as well. But what exactly “bugs” social media users the most?
That is the question one pest control company wanted to answer by surveying people who are active on social media as to which “digital pests” bothered them the most. The survey covered a number of different sites and annoying behaviors, finding which money-focused posts people find most off-putting (multi-level marketing schemes, unsurprisingly), which kinds of unnecessarily personal posts people are sick of seeing (users who exclusively post their political opinions), and which users others think are most negatively over-the-top (trolls). The survey found how all of those behaviors stack up in comparison to other kinds of posts and posters that fall into those same genres as well.
Beyond those specific behaviors that can often apply to multiple social media platforms, the company also found out which kind of behavior users are most bothered by on each of the five largest social media platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
Each of the five most-cited annoyances on each respective platform are listed in order of the percentage of survey responses that singled each out. While there is overlap among some of the annoyances and platforms, the unique differences that appear on only one or two lists there are definitely worth checking out, as they can show how the purpose of different sites and what users want to get out of them can shape what those users find most annoying on each. A common theme, however, was that almost all social media users wish these platforms had less bullying and produced more positivity than they currently do.
