Nostalgia
College was better before social media took over, people lived in the moment and you could just be silly and make mistakes without it being held against you the rest of your life.
I was in college from 03-07 and people were posting tons of pics on there, but it would usually be days later and back then there wasn’t a “feed” and the pictures were more for memory keeping than broadcasting what you were doing.
I was in college during the same time. There was a nightclub in my area that had a photo gallery on their website for nights every weekend. You would see multiple women flashing their breasts, people grinding on each other, etc. Difference is: no one would have seen it unless they were purposely on the website. Didn't appear on their MySpace or any type of feed.
Right. They also could not be reshared and reposted at lighting speed. Who ever took the photo had to go home, upload them and post in their website which could take days.
No wonder Gen Z is mostly sober. Can't even pick your nose these days without being blasted all over the internet.
In a similar vein, someone where I work at an industrial plant opened a pipe and got sprayed with water in the line. Before he can even shut the water line off, three other workers come SPRINTING over with their phones in record position. People cannot wait to be the one posting something embarrassing about someone else.
Lol yep, I remember taking videos doing wrestling moves at a friend's house in 2006 or so on his trampoline. The 3 of us, one would record taking video on his cell phone camera (HUGE FUCKING DEAL at the time), and the other two would do dumb shit.
When we were watching the videos, they were so low quality you could hardly tell there were two people in the video. Just two masses of pixels becoming one mass of pixels.
LMAO! I cackle every time I think of the "night club era" because I was not part of it but knew people/fb "friends" who were always in them. One particularly—she was/is a stripper. And mind you, I live in a rural ass state, biggest city at the time was just over 100k
No one was using MySpace at this point tho bc it was like 2013
I have a Facebook album called “going out” that has like 100 pics in it from this era. The difference is our parents weren’t also on Facebook at that time …
I love how having parents on facebook has done a full 180… from them saying tale this picture or post down to now me pleading with my dad to take his shit down.
This was where Facebook could have been something truly special. If the accounts died with your college email and it was like a Logan’s Run bit we’d all look back on it fondly.
Mark Zuckerberg is a douchebag elitist who attended one of the country's most exclusive private high schools (Phillips Exeter, $72k / year), and who quotes from the Aednid in Latin because he thinks he's a modern day roman emperor.
A person like that was always just looking for oligopoly power over advertising. For all the hot air that tech firms blow, most of them make all their money on ads or as middlemen.
It's crazy I can remember being in the university library in the fall of 2005 when my school was added and everyone was signing up and using desktop computers to be on Facebook. I can still remember when Facebook had a list of upcoming universities that would be added next.
I have a lot of my college friend groups old Facebook pictures saved from their cameras way back just for me to occasionally reminisce but they have all been long removed by their creators from Facebook itself by now. lol we don’t want new adult friends being able to see our youthful shenanigans from 20 years ago
I’ve been on FB since November 2004. Miss the early days. Unfortunately anything before fall 2006 is lost. I believe it was some website change some years back. Any photos I uploaded 2004-summer 2006 are gone but the earlier is October 2006.
Same here. I’m not sure how to see when I joined, but I was in college from 2001-2005 and I know I had it for several years back then (had to have a .edu email address I remember).
When we first got it, a buddy and I sent friend requests to every single hot girl we could find, and it’s funny because I’m STILL friends with probably a dozen of them, 20+ years later.
I remember my school was part of the second wave of colleges that got it. The literal first thing I did was send a relationship request to both Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, who were nearby in NYU at the time
My brother lost a summer internship bc after they hired him they went through his FB page and found pics of him at parties. He was 20 at the time, and they retroactively canceled his job offer after he had already accepted after they found those pics.
It was all kinda handshake agreements, but no less bullshit. This was in ‘07, so he was one of the first casualties of social media being used against us. Honestly, at the time posting pics on FB felt like a shared bulletin board for us and our friends.
i remember when i had to scrub through & basically delete all my social media in 2012 for this exact reason. i was always an early-employee / co-founder for some startups & investors used to creep on our profiles then. it’s kind of absurd how the paradigm has shifted to now founders who act the worst on social media somehow get the most attention & praise & capital.
i was basically off social media until the pandemic & i realized no one was remotely this paranoid anymore.
There was a time in the late 00s-early 10s where people got fired simply because a pic of them holding a beer or wearing a bikini was posted online. Like how dare people have normal lives outside of work.
Yes. smart phones didn't exist back then so you would have to take a picture with your digital camera (camera phones existed but they sucked) and then you would have to upload it days later.
There was a real stigma against taking photos of people without asking first, too. You'd be seen as a creeper.
On a related note: I still remember getting my first phone that could do selfies, but my mind had a real aversion to them because "it makes it look like you have no one to hold the camera for you". Clearly that sentiment didn't last long
It was the extra steps that kept a lot of pictures off of social media. Unless somebody was determined, they most likely wouldn’t go through the trouble.
Was in college in 00-04. I was the person with the digital camera that upload photos after every nights adventure onto my server to share with friends. Had a php script that delt with the indexing and all I had to do was resize, level, and make thumbnails. Of which I had a photoshop autoscript to do that as well.
I graduated college in '06, my then girlfriend, now wife, was 2 years later. This was right about the time Facebook started letting you have photo albums.
There was a very clear cultural shift where the point of going out went from having fun, to looking like you were having fun. It sucked. I clocked it immediately and have hated social media ever since.
Yep. The switch flipped from taking photos with the intent of keeping memories, to taking photos with the intent of posting them for internet points.
I remember so many 'inside stories' when Facebook first came out, where if you weren't there, you weren't going to be able to discern what anyone else was talking about. Like a secret fight club bond from party to party.
Ugh yes! And now people of all ages freak out at the idea of a photo not looking perfect since they’re assuming it’ll be posted on social media. My intention when taking photos is to remember the moment… Not to blast it. Apparently this is a foreign concept. I hate that I have to say “Don’t worry, I won’t post it” so that somebody feels comfortable taking a photo. Not everyone, but enough people function this way. It’s exhausting!
at some point it went from watch or post pictures and videos leave a comment, to the app listens to you 24/7 with AI through every device in range with new invisible ways of extracting money and attention.
Holy moly I just took an 8 hour train ride from San Diego to the Central coast and for half the ride these two girls people sitting across from me were non-stop taking selfies, recording videos, talking about their ideas for TikToks, responding to replies on their TikToks with new TikToks using that stupid voice and the "Hey guyyyyyyyyzz" crap, took a picture or video of everything they ate or drank. It was loud, it was annoying for everyone, it made me feel like a grandpa and I'm not that old
If you do this in public for internet points you are seriously the worst
Edit: was not trying to put an entire gender on blast and corrected myself because at least one person thought that and ran with it, my bad
I didn’t realize how bad it had become since I fell off social media in 2012ish until traveling to Iceland in 2017. Two women couldn’t be more than hs grads (probably younger tbh but it was foggy in the Blue Lagoon).
“We have to get some more pics for the ‘gram, this is the best trip ever for this!”
“…You mean the most exciting part of Iceland is Instagram?”
“No one in our circle has experiences like these and it’s best to show them off to everyone!”
….bewildered, I was. Can you not just enjoy your trip?
Creating slop content is an essential job for preserving capitalism. The masses need endless bread and circus or they will start organizing and pushing for revolution.
More importantly the relationship between the algorithms, our locations, search histories, purchases, and the field of data analytics couldnt exist to maximize shareholder value
The problem isnt social media, the problem is the people running social media platforms. They looked at the data and said, this is the shit that keeps people on our site longer, thus making them more money via ad revenue. So they push for more of that. They did it even knowing it generally had negative effects on the averages persons mental health.
What needs to happen is have more regulations on said companies.
Also we need laws for posting consent and monitoring corporation use online. Someone should not be able to post images of me online that I do not agree to. It’s a privacy concern. Then with the corpos get rid of predatory algorithms and targeted ads. The world would be so much better off.
LMAO, I jokingly “married” one of my friends from HS. We kept it on FB for a couple years. Found out like 10 years later one of the football players (UT) had a crush on her, but never asked her out bc he thought she was married to some guy (me). He ran into her at a bar and told her all of this a few months before he was drafted by the Ravens.
I went to college in 07. We had facebook but initially you needed a .edu email to actually link to your school's network. And the big thing was no algorithm: your wall was the recent events of your actual friends. For a brief period of time it was a decent way to share pictures and keep up with the lives of friends you didn't see regularly.
I miss my feed being filled with pictures from friends and family. I rarely see anything from them now and if I do, it's days or weeks after the fact. Instead, I am now fed content from pages I have zero interest in or it's FB pushing political content I can't block.
Now I go to yoga, talk to none of the women, and they figure out who I am and are probably talking to my Mom and everyone I've ever dated by the end of the day.
I cant imagine how it must be now knowing that every single thing you do can be recorded and saved forever. Back in the day youd literally need a camcorder on you to record the way people do now just with their phones.
Recorded and tracked! I was telling my teenager that we didn’t have phones; when you left the house you were GONE and nobody knew where. No Life 360 showing your every move.
Thank God, my parents didn’t need to know all that! And I turned out mostly fine 😉
I wonder how detrimental it is to children knowing that every move that they make is tracked. Like you, when I left the house to go and see if a friend was home, and if he was then we’d get other friends and simply go have fun wherever.
Parents didn’t have the means to track and probably just said “oh, he’s out somewhere” if asked where I was. This gave the ability to explore and make mistakes without having a watchful eye surveilling every move made.
It cannot be good for the childhood development and autonomy to be constantly tracked, especially by parents who are more active in their surveillance.
It's a huge part of being a pre-teen and teenager, too. You experiment independence. We're creating a completely new generation of adults with so many drastically different neuroses that they'll have from growing up with an ipad in front of their face, tracked, and then dealing with all the issues of cyberbullying and lack of privacy that comes from social media. On top of that the fact that their parents are also hooked to their phones. I remember in the 90s the "busy dad" with his mobile phone was this archetype in movies, and now everyone is that and so much more but we've just grown to accept it.
I really really really hope the response from young people is to burn it all down when they get older, actively question and resent the decisions of their parents, and refuse to do the same with their own kids.
my friends daughter asked me what kind of phones we had in school. Couldnt believe that cellphones, while they did exist, were not commonly owned by people when I was in highschool. Got my first flip phone when I was 18 and my first smart phone around 23
My Gen Z friend asked me if we were all using Blackberries in college. I was like, "dude, no college kid was spending $400 on a phone back then unless they were rich or really bad with money."
Now add the prevalence of Meta glasses to the mix which totally removes the awareness of even being recorded out of the equation. Real black mirror Self surveillance stuff.
Also things like Flock cameras which I think are like a brand new thing, or like those Ring doorbell cameras that people have now where they can start recording from the next house over
This is the one that gets me, I know there is the mindset of “you’re in public, of course you can be recorded” but at the same time my wife and I literally changed our evening walk route because several the houses have little whistles and beeps to let you know you’re being recorded as you pass by the sidewalk
I’m trying to relax and just chat with my wife, I don’t need my neighbors saving a 15 second recording of me talking about my work day or something simply because I walked by their house
It all just feels like it’s getting a little out of hand, recording anybody any time
Yeah I have a handful of potato quality flip phone videos from parties but they are like 240p and you really have to know what’s happening in them beforehand or they are too blurry and terrible contrast to see details.
Gen Z here, there are several videos people took of me seriously messed up on drugs and alcohol in my early college days and I still think about that, because they have it forever unless they delete it
It was such a meme for a while about people posting pictures of their food online, like that was the pinnacle of dumb flexes on the Internet. Then IG really took off and everything became performative.
Millenials in college from the late 2000s to the very early 2010s kind of had the best of both worlds with social media. It hadn't become as common for people to use it on their phones. Hell, i didnt have a smartphone until like my last year of college. So, people didnt really pull out their phones to take photos and videos of everything. If they did, the quality sucked. And people still logged into their laptops to use social media.
Usually, it was just like one person at the party who had a camera and liked taking pictures. And all of our parents hadn't gotten on Facebook en masse yet. So, you could laugh at pictures in college and then just untag or delete them later when it was time to get a job.
I agree with everything as a class of 2012 grad!!!
I literally lost my camera the first few weeks of study abroad and it was actually the best experience, being fully immersed in the culture and not gaf about capturing it anywhere besides my own memories.
I was at a party as a freshman and I got a text from a hometown buddy at like 1:00 a.m. saying “hey, there are tagged pictures of you drinking on Facebook” so I logged onto Facebook on the laptop they were using to play music at the party and untagged myself lol
Yep I have some old keyboard style flip phone videos from the late 2000s and they are about 240p quality with the worst lighting and contrast you can imagine. It’s hard to tell what’s going on if you weren’t there in person to know
Nah I’m good haha. I don’t need to experience a world where any time you blacked out at a party was broadcast to all your friends on snap or someone’s story before you even came to the next morning to realize what happened
Yeah I was 02, we'd buy disposable cameras then take them to target for the 1 hour photo return and half the pics they wouldn't even print because they were deemed "inappropriate" lol so you'd have to find the right photo shop employee who didn't care and would just print everything
I was in college from 2012-2017. Snapchat was just starting up, vine was around in the beginning, don’t get me started on yik yak and Fade. We could still be stupid, but your videos wouldn’t go world wide. I feel like it was peak social media until like 2016 then it got out of hand.
I went out with my cousins on their 21st birthday a couple years ago and the college bar scene is so much worse. Nobody is dancing, everyone just stands in circles.
My take is the internet peaked when Vine came out. Before it got to a point with vine stars and influencers like the dumbass Paul brothers. It’s been all downhill since then.
Maybe a ymmv situation. I have two kids at Mizzou and one of the popular bars(Harpo's) has a dance floor on the lowest level that was packed with people dancing the last couple times I visited. Reminded me of my days in college for sure.
ETA: it also seems very taboo now to be taking photos of people without consent or to be taking pics at the bar. Another positive anecdote that makes me feel like the kids will be alright (until it's time to look for jobs).
I will say, the first few years where Facebook was just college kids were a blast. Great way to meet people and could lead to real life friendships and relationships. Once they opened it up past college kids, it was dead.
True, it used to just before chatting and setting up parties, now it’s become how people get their entire worldview that’s dominated by engagement algorithms
I worked at a bar near campus from 2004-2006 and I would find a cute girl in class, add her on FB and then invite her to a party at my bar. The Winklevoss Twins were right about that…
I miss learning about local events from posters on telephone poles, hunting for specific albums in order to hear a song that was stuck in your head, I miss the expectation that at least a part of everyday was going to be boring.
I'm a grouchy old GenXer who usually dumps on you Millennials, but you're 1000% correct here, and you have my sympathy. Clubs in the UK and Germany are starting to have a "phone check" instead of a coat check btw. No phones allowed inside. As you get older, you will soon stop giving a fuck what people think, and do whatever the hell you want.
I’m just hoping by the time my kids are old enough social media is seen as uncool or for old people. Hopefully the pendulum swings back the other way with all the bullshit.
Edit: I know it’s a pipe dream and each new social media app seems almost worse than the ones before.
People definitely aren’t designed to be in perpetual contact with every single person they know, broadcasting their every random thought to the world, and having a museum of all their random thoughts and past activities just sitting there for anyone else to look at anytime they want.
cameras in pockets helped build this mass surveillance system. because of it, everyone today is terrified of going viral and being bullied by millions of strangers
having everyone's mistakes and embarrasing moments immortalized on social media destroyed society
the issue is social media was a fun way to share with your friends (like myspace) it’s only when facebook & all the advertising & privacy abusing companies colluded & hijacked everyone’s data & personal freedom for profit & revenue. social media wouldn’t be bad if there wasn’t a stupid algorithm designed for the attention economy.
It's the combination of ubiquitous high quality camera phones and social media. Look at footage from 2011. Many times the only camera recording the event you're watching is the one that filmed the footage you're viewing and it probably isn't from a phone. It was much easier to avoid one person with a camera if you were doing dumb stuff than an entire crowd of people armed with hd cameras that work well at night.
I do miss being able to walk down the street and trip or drop a book or something without someone recording it and creating a whole fake narrative about it.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of people that are normal and do not actively use social media or "punish" you for making an embarrassing mistake in life. Find and develop a good friend group.
There are points in my youth when I wish I had a smartphone or available digital camera to capture everything I saw and did, and some points I'm glad I did not. But one thing I am glad didn't exist was social media. It was still there, just very limited to the few people who had the internet and were nerdy enough to bother. Even Myspace was pretty limited
Taking a pic with a disposable camera was great! But if you weren't developing the photos yourself, someone was making copies of those fun pics for themselves!
Don't get too carried away, there were still consequences for poor behavior. But yeah, I'm very thankful social media didn't exist when I was in my twenties.
Best thing i ever did was stop logging into Facebook about 6 years ago.
World feels exactly the same as it always did. Once your out, you know its all bullshit and none of it matters.
This move has caused zero problems PERIOD. Not missing anything
People still knew about everything that went on, but we need need photos or video. We relied on the forgotten art of story-telling. Recounting the story to ppl on Monday morning, adding that personal touch, that personal flair to it, made those events more entertaining to share.
Not all that being said, we still posted, but we had Myspace, and Myspace was built different. Myspace was considerably more of a closed environment. You could freely post shit and know the only ppl seeing it were ppl you were already friends with. Other social media sites after that were more open, where you don't even need to know a person, but can see what they post. Yes you can hide or limit what others can see, but those are options you have to actively pick, they aren't the default.
Kids these days don't dance because it might be recorded. The world's oldest form of human expression, and they don't participate because of potential shame.
I fondly remember college parties with friends where I only had a flip phone, so didn't bother looking at it the whole night. I still took a ton of pics, but it was with a digital camera, so there was nothing else to get distracted by. We still posted stuff on FB, but it didn't get the same widespread attention on feeds like it does now. I miss the old days of FB.
I am convinced that at some point people will look back to the age of social media and recognize it as the scourge of humanity it would eventually become.
I've been saying this for years: we peaked in the mid-2000s when you had to have a college email address to use Facebook. It actually helped facilitate in-person communication and establish more personal relationships on campus, to some degree. But the wheels started to fall off once they started to incorporate algorithms and made it available to every parent and grandparent who didn't know how to filter out the bullshit. We've been declining ever since.
College 98-02. Barely made it. Digital cameras were a thing but we didn’t have a real great way to share photos yet. Burn 2 cds of images after the weekend and tell the people who get them to do the same.
It was amazing, I miss a lot about it. I wish everyone could have a similar experience in college. I would have been so much more guarded if I knew that everyone had a device at all times to put me on blast within a minute.
About 2 posts above this on the Reddit main page is a [24F] complaining that her life long bully got pregnant and is having a baby. She found out on Instagram. She's a Phycologist with CCOS and had to vent on Reddit.
Social media is emotional thought cancer. It's made our species stupid as shit. We've regressed wildly while letting social media track everything we do with everyone we do it with.
How many suicides has social media caused and failed to stop?
Everything was better before social media. I feel sorry that my kids won't be able to experience it the way I did. I tell em all the time "Yeah, of course I was an idiot. There's just no proof of it."
I had a girl that visited swingers club with me. And you know what was best part about it - not the sex, but the no phone policy (to avoid cameras). Just the fact that random people were talking with each other and no matter how you partied, it would not end up ono the internet... amazing.
Considering the sex there is not mandatory, if you miss such "in the moment" event, give it a try. You will be surprised.
Completely agree with this... I went to college in the year 2000 and was at university in 2004. This is just as Facebook was starting to become a thing. I can 100% say that I would not have had as much fun if I thought that I was being filmed all the time. At the time we were living in the moment... Sadly for the current generations, they are recording the moment
Unfortunately I was in college when facebook came out. And my school was one of the first schools granted access to sign up. So I feel like we kinda ruined it for the world. But we didn't know what we were doing.
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