STUDY: “LOL” is Becoming Extinct
We all express laughter in different ways online. I never caught on to the “LOL” bandwagon, because, well, it never really made sense to me. I was always more of a classic “haha” kind of guy. Just felt natural and not so of-the-moment-y. It looks like I was right.
In April, The New Yorker did a funny piece on e-laughter, which prompted Facebook to look even deeper. According to Facebook, the social networking giant “analyzed de-identified posts and comments posted on Facebook in the last week of May” to come up with statistics about how people are laughing online. Here are some of the more interesting things they came up with:
- Only 1.9 percent of people use “LOL”
- Just over half of users evaluated use “haha”
- A third of those characterize their guffaws with emojis
- 13 percent use “hehe”
- Young people and women prefer emoji
- Men prefer longer “hehes”
- People in Chicago and New York prefer emoji
- People in Seattle and San Francisco prefer “hahas”
Facebook didn’t seem to take into account “ROFL” or the even-more-satisfying “bwhahahahahah,” but hey, those kinds of belly laughs are hard to come by when you’re making funnies on social media. Facebook does however, follow up all their data with a fun collection of charts and graphs that better help you visualize how people are e-giggling. Check it out here
if you want a little more.
