Facebook study finds LOL has lost its shine

THE LOLS are over. Facebook has been peering into your posts and found the popular internet acronym for ‘laughing out loud’ is on the wane. So, who gets the last laugh?

A funny thing happened to LOL

THE LOLS are over. Facebook has been peering into your posts and found the popular internet acronym for ‘laughing out loud’ is on the wane. So, how do we now express our mirth online?

With an old-fashioned “haha”, at least for half of us.

Emojis have climbed up into second place.

“Hehe” is in third spot — though it may actually be a deliberately slightly less-strong laugh than “haha”.

LOL has been left languishing in fourth place, with only two per cent of Facebook followers using the term.

Source: Facebook

The study The Not-So-Universal Language of Laughter was prompted by a mirthful column published in the New Yorker.

It was examining the notion of e-laughter, their uses and subtle nuances.

Facbook decided to add some substance to the speculation — deconstructing posts and comments on its service to find the most commonly used form.

This plot shows that the median person (the dashed line) that uses emoji is slightly younger than the median haha person, but both of these are younger than the people using hehes and lols! Source: Facebook

“As denizens of the internet will know, laughter is quite common,” the report reads, “15 per cent of people included laughter in a post or comment that week.”

It appears younger people and women prefer to use emoji.

Men are the biggest user of ‘hehe’s and ‘haha’s. Women prefer the cutesy emojis.

Source: Facebook

Whatever your preference, Facebook says you appear to stick to it — using it to the exclusion of other forms.

Some have been known to overdo it.

“Our automatic regular expression parser gave up after trying to get through a haha over 600 letters long!” the Facebook study reads. “Computers have a long way to go before they can truly understand the human condition. We weren’t laughing that day.”