Bad news for all you “lol” lovers – “haha” is taking over the internet.
That’s according to a new study by Facebook, who looked into how users express laughter online (because of course they did), and “haha” and its variants are now far and away the most common terms used on social networks, accounting for 51.4% of apparent laughter in the comments and posts analysed by the team.
The laughter emoji claimed 33.7%, while “hehe” showed up 13.1% of the time. Sadly, the once all-powerful “lol” appeared in just 1.9% of the text sampled by Facebook – a dramatic fall from grace for the former online text speak superhero.
It wasn’t all bad news for “lol”, however, as it proved slightly more popular with older users who are still stuck in their text speak ways. Emoji, meanwhile, were most popular with the younger generation and women, but “haha” tended to be favoured by men.
We’re not sure what we’re meant to do with this information but, hey, here’s a graph:
The super important research also examined how users deployed variants of these laughter terms, looking at whether they hehe’d more than they hehehehe’d, and so on.
Explaining their findings, Facebook’s researchers said:
The most common are the four-letter hahas and hehes. The six-letter hahaha is also very common, and in general, the haha-ers use longer laughter. The haha-ers are also slightly more open than the hehe-ers to using odd number of letters, and we do see the occasional hahaas and hhhhaaahhhaas.
The lol almost always stands by itself, though some rare specimens of lolz and loll were found. A single emoji is used 50 percent of the time, and it’s quite rare to see people use more than five identical consecutive emoji.
Got all that? Life altering stuff.
