You can hide away your secrets as much as you like and you can try and cover your past as hard as you can, but what you’ve posted on social media can sometimes be forever, especially if it was super cringey and awkward.
That’s right, all those embarrassing photos of you holding up energy drink in the park when you were fourteen pretending to be cool may haunt you forever…along with those dreadful Facebook statuses. Here are some of the top embarrassing things we all used to do while spending time on social media:
The ‘Like For Like’
How did we let this happen? Fully, functioning intellectual human beings hashtagging their Instagram photos with ‘#like4like’ in the hopes that they’ll get eleven plus likes on their post. Why did this happen…vanity, the hopes a crush would see it, people simply following the crowd? It didn’t just start here. Long ago, when the world still used Myspace and Piczo, people would simply write on each other’s profiles ‘comment for comment’, because they wanted instant gratification from their friends and then it turned into a full cult of people liking each other’s photos, even if they didn’t know them.
‘Like This and I’ll Write Five Things I Like About You’
I mean, we all love being appreciated, there’s no point hiding that. When your friend starts reeling off things they like about you, it’s a big boost to your ego. Not long ago, Facebook users would write a status saying simply ‘Like this and I will write on your wall what I like about you’ and like moths to a flame people would click the like button and receive a paragraph on their wall. It’s a good feeling, until people the user didn’t know well enough started liking it too and then they would have to start getting creative with their responses.
Along with the friendly comments, people also posted statuses saying they would rate you on your looks and personality and post it on your wall. This demeaning trend must have sent users into meltdowns as they all patiently waited for their friends’ reviews on their aesthetics.
The Third Person Status
If you look back through your Facebook history, you’ll realise that very early on in your social media life you were writing statuses in third person. If you didn’t, please give yourself a huge pat on the back. Statuses were often written like ‘Olivia Newman…is enjoying the sun’. The third person status looks very visually unappealing and when paired with a cringey breach of personal information can make you want to crawl into your covers and hide if you look at it long enough.
Chatting on the Wall
Facebook used to be like graffitiing all your juice gossip on a wall…but not anonymously and in a place where all your friends can see it. Once upon a time, in a world before Messenger, people used to chat on each other’s Facebook walls, meaning the conversation was out there for everyone to see. Teamed with some serious teenage angst, many discussions were fuelled by the day’s events whether they be good or bad or were simply one friend asking the other what time they wanted them to meet up. Let’s all thank Facebook for the invention of direct messaging on the platform, so we no longer have to witness text conversations while we are trying to watch cute videos of dogs riding skateboards.
