LOL (Laugh Out Loud) is dead and has been included in the internet slang trash bin, together with ROFL (Rolling on the Floor Laughing) and LMAO (Laughing My Ass Off).
This is according to a study conducted by the social networking giant, Facebook (FB) last May, on the different expressions of laughter used in their website.
The move was inspired by the article about online laughter entitled, "Hahaha vs. Hehehe." Sarah Larson wrote the article for The New Yorker.
For a week, Facebook looked into the varieties of laughter posted by 15 percent of its users in the sites' different sections and comments. These were their findings:
- FB users like to laugh. Out of the 15 percent of comments studied, an expression of laughter was used. (FB says that 15 percent is quite a lot of laughs already.)
- 51 percent use "haha" as their expression of laughter, therefore it is the most popular by far.
- 31 percent insert an emoji, which means "picture letter" in Japanese, or the special character that is a part of a Unicode standard.
- 13 percent use "hehe."
- Only 1.9 percent still use LOL, which actually is the original e-laugh.
A closer look at the profile will also tell us that:
- 46 percent of the FB users who were studied, posted only one laugh that week, meaning they were not regular e-laughers.
- 85 percent of the e-laughers posted a laugh at least five times that week.
- The "haha-ers" usually use longer laughter; while some only use four to eight letters, others use more. They even discovered one e-laugh made of 600 characters.
- Younger people prefer to use emojis and "haha."
- Older people use "hehe" and "LOL" more frequently.
- Female users insert emojis and "LOL" more often.
- Male users are fond of the "haha" and "hehe" laughters.
So the next time you post a laughter on your page, choose which group you want to belong to--haha!
