Why are you posting pictures on your friends wall for their birthday

Facebook is renowned for it’s bizarre, somewhat pointless trends: the Kylie Jenner lip challenge, ‘tag a mate who’ memes and horrendous ‘pranksters’ beating up their girlfriends for a slice of internet fame.

But one trend has slipped under the radar, so ingrained in our inner psyche that we hardly fail to realise it’s even there: posting photos on friends’ timelines to celebrate their birthday is surely one of the weirdest things to happen on social media, at least so consistently.

Remember this guy?

Think about it: circa 2014, the Instagram wave really kicked off and people started compiling little collages for their best friends on their birthday – a cute gesture highlighting your favourite memories of the birthday girl (or boy). This trend, understandably, spread to Facebook and soon Facebook was inundated with best friends sharing their best memories.

Now don’t get me wrong, this is fine. Sharing memories with those close to you is wonderful and  perfect gesture for someone’s birthday. What gets me though is what I’ve started to notice recently where posting a photo seems almost compulsory, as if a simple wall post was ever enough.

This is cute

I’d stipulate that a wall post was never ‘enough’. Perhaps I’m ungrateful but receiving a copy and pasted ‘happy birthday :)’ on my timeline from someone I haven’t spoken to since I left Scouts in 2009 is more of an inconvenience than anything else, I’d rather just not have the notification.

But what’s even stranger, even more frustrating – not as a receiver, but as an onlooker – is the way people insist on posting pictures on friends’ walls, even when they’re not really friends. This lack of closeness means they don’t have enough pictures to compile a collage, not enough videos to make a flipagram, they don’t even have a picture of just the two of them. So rather than concede defeat like a decent, respectful human being, they click ‘see friendship’ and find a photo from 2012 in which they both semi-feature in a desperate bid for online validation.

‘Haha, remember when we both scraped in to this pic together?x’

Why does everyone insist on buying in to this bullshit? Maybe it’s just that it’s exam season and I’m a little stressed, but for some reason I’m becoming increasingly aggravated by my timeline becoming blocked up by photos which should never have gone on Facebook in the first place.

If you actually care that it’s someone’s birthday, you don’t find a photo of the two of you from your mutual friends ‘Summer ’11 :P’ album, you send a card, you give them a phone call, maybe you just drop them a text. Facebook wall posts from acquaintances were meaningless enough as it is, don’t make it more obvious by highlighting the fact you’ve barely even met.