You know that person on your Twitter feed (or your Facebook, or your Instagram) that you actually can’t stand? Every post they make causes you to call a friend so you can smack-talk the poster. You read their tweets and question the intelligence of all of humanity.

There are a wide variety of these online irritants. You have the “I’m going to post every single emotion that I go through today” girls. Then there are the “I’ll tell everyone about how drunk I got this weekend and end it with ‘YOLO'” guys. Not to mention the resident philosophers, who try to convey the deep life lessons they’ve learned in the five minutes that it took them to walk from their dorm room to their class in Doorley.

Periodically, you might say something along the lines of “I am seriously going to unfollow [insert obscenely narcissistic twitter handle here],” but you know it’s an empty threat. You just can’t give up the exceptionally frustrating habit. You really, really want to stop, but it’s no use.

I see more posts on social media sites that make me crazy than I care to admit. Yet, I continue to scroll through my Facebook newsfeed and read these tweets, silently judging or outwardly scoffing the lives of others.

Then, I’ll see these people later on campus the same day, and one of two thoughts will run through my mind: either, “How can you be so pleasant in person and so annoying online?” or “Wow, you’re annoying in person too.”

There are a lot of excuses for keeping these people on our profiles: “I don’t want them to realize I unfriended them and make it awkward,” is the most common. Well, aren’t we thoughtful?

What else is stopping us from cutting out the junk from our newsfeed? Let’s be honest: seeing other people’s posts makes us feel better about our own lives.

We see the tweet, we groan, we read it out loud to our roommate, and we say, “Well, at least I’m not as annoying as her,” or “At least my life doesn’t suck as much as his.”

Then there is the other benefit we get from these posts: When we talk about them with our friends, it becomes like a game or an inside joke. We read them out loud and laugh with each other, and the validation of others makes us feel even better about ourselves.

Is it really kinder to try to “spare this person’s feelings” by continuing to follow them if we’re just going to complain about and ridicule them behind their backs? Probably not.

Then again, one could argue that, since these people willingly post all of these comments online, the derision is rightly deserved. Hey, if you want to tweet every five seconds about how much you love (and then hate, and then love) your boyfriend, then you deserve to have all of your followers critique your relationship. Right?

I guess there’s no ultimate authority on who deserves scorn due to their online personalities, but I do know that the way I view people online affects the amount of time I want to spend interacting with them in the real world.

Does this make me judgmental and critical? Maybe. Do the majority of us do it? I would say so. Am I going to continue to judge the posts of others? Yup.

I guess the best we can do is think before we post, so that we share what we really want to share and keep in mind that the Internet is not our personal diary.

Because really, Gaels, there are enough people out there who will continue to post about every detail of their lives without us adding our check-in on Walsh Hill to the mix.

To contact The Ionian’s Julie Donato, e-mail her at [email protected]