Stuff Nerds Hate #1: Social Networking Sites
Today, I’m going in a slightly different direction. Instead of writing about something that nerds like, I’m going to touch on something nerds hate. Today’s lesson in hate:
Social Networking Sites
You meet someone. You’re not sure if they’re cool or not - they seem a little quirky, but, at first, that seems kind of interesting. They’re able to talk intelligently about just about every topic you throw at them. You decide you must keep in touch with this person, so you ask them if they have a Facebook account.
They say no.
Hmm, you think to yourself, that’s strange. All of you other friends have Facebook accounts. Maybe this person is just a Myspace holdover and hasn’t bothered to migrate yet. It’s been a while since you’ve signed in, of course, but now you might have an excuse to check in again. So, you ask them what their Myspace user name is.
They don’t have one.
Twitter? Denied. Now this person is starting to look pained and a little annoyed. Well, okay, you think to yourself, let’s ask this person how they keep track of their friends. Surely they have some mechanism available to them to let 1,247 of their closest friends know what’s going on in their lives. Maybe this person just uses Livejournal or something.
“Livejournal?” he snorts. “You’re kidding, right?”
Now you’re getting pissed. He’s starting to sound awfully condescending, and you’re not appreciating it much. Plus, you’re discovering that this new, interesting person you met seems to not care how their friends find about them. However, as a last ditch effort, you decide you’ll ask this new person how they keep track of their friends and vice-versa. What site does this person use?
The new person relaxes for a second. You can tell that they are very relieved you asked that question, though you don’t understand why just yet. Then, they give you their answers, and you’ve never heard of any of them. They start talking about Usenet. They mention that they have a blog on a web server that’s operating out of their closet. At about the point that they begin to explain what patches they made to Apache in order to get their customized installation of Wordpress going, you realize something:
You’ve met a nerd.
Nerds despise social networking sites for a variety of reasons. This much is fairly well documented. Most nerds have issues with how it makes “advanced” technology like web pages accessible, and how that will lead to the end of all civilization. This has been the mantra of nerds for at least as long as AOL has been a household name, and there’s a very good reason for this: Whenever somebody gets on to something like Myspace, Facebook, AOL, Geocities, or whatever and it breaks/doesn’t do what they think it should/they can’t get it to do what they want it to do/etc., who do they call to fix it? That’s right - the nerd. After a while of this, the nerd gets rather tired of dealing with these issues, most of which would have been prevented if, in their mind, the person would’ve just used some basic common sense and did “simple” things like finding the checksum of that program they downloaded and seeing if it matches the number the manufacturer provides, or setting up SSH tunnels to key sites, or checked to see if their HTML syntax conformed to the latest W3C standards. That the person they’re trying to help has no idea what a checksum is or what an SSH tunnel is just reinforces their belief that (insert social networking site here) is a haven of illiterate, drooling morons who are not fit for breeding stock.
When dealing with a nerd, it’s important to remember that, if you require them to be remotely helpful, it’s important to not come off as a drooling moron. Consequently, avoid mentioning social networking sites around one. If you must, try to couch it with rationalizes such as, “Well, I wouldn’t be on there, but my family is on there and it’s the only way I can keep track of them.” Be sure to declare any feature that allows someone to talk or interact with you as “annoying” and “frustrating”. This will tell the nerd that you’re in it to make your friends and family happy, and not because you’re a drooling moron - this will cause a feeling of minor sympathy to well up in the nerd, which can be used to extract favors and tech support.
Stuff Nerds Like | David Colborne | 
August 8, 2008 11:38 am
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By SFG, August 18, 2008 @ 7:55 pm
Another good point is that we don’t have a lot of friends, so our friends count tends to be rather low, and a facebook account simply advertises that to the world.