Follow-Follow: A Social Media Dichotomy

Before social media became what it is today, the landscape looked completely different. Some of the earliest platforms we had were 2Go, Facebook, BlackBerry Messenger, Viber, and WeChat. I can't speak much on 2Go, I never really used it, but I know it had its moment for people who did. The real turning point came around 2015 or 2016, when Facebook acquired Instagram.

My own first interaction with social media was early 2016. Before that, I had no accounts anywhere. That January, I created a Facebook account, a Twitter account, an Instagram account, and a 2Go account, all within weeks of each other. It felt like a coming-of-age thing. That first Instagram is still up somewhere, about ten years old now, though I won't be linking the new one.

Back then, social media had one job: connect you to people. Family, friends, peers. That intention was in the design of every platform. Facebook was the big one, the aspirational one, and that's why a lot of millennials and Gen X never left it. For them, Facebook was the whole game, start to finish.

Then Instagram took over. You opened the app, you posted a picture, that was it. I still remember the old logo, that brownish camera icon. Twitter existed for a different reason: to give you a place to say what you thought. Reddit and Quora were already around for that too, but Twitter had the bird, and Jack Dorsey would tell you the name was meant to mimic the sound of a tweet.

Go back and look at posts from 2013 to 2016 and you'll see how unfiltered they were. Random pictures, no thought given to composition or lighting or whether it "fit the aesthetic." Honestly, it was one of the more beautiful things about that era, even if nobody knew it at the time.

Then COVID happened in 2020, and social media lost a lot of what made it that way. Not all bad, though. On one hand, it gave us what we now call the creator economy, a real way for people to make money doing this. On the other hand, it cost us the authenticity. Everyone became a "banga boy." Everyone wanted to be an influencer, posting curated, high-quality shots of a life that mostly wasn't real. The rawness that made it fun in the first place just wasn't there anymore.

I'm genuinely glad I got to experience it before that shift happened. Back then, all anyone cared about on IG was the follower count. We did the follow-for-follow thing, shouting each other out, hoping people would follow back, and somehow you'd end up with a small army of bots from Indian farms following you. It sounds ridiculous now, but you could have seven thousand followers and maybe a tenth of them were real people. Meta never cared. Nobody policed it.

Monetization changed all of that. Now there are really just two camps left: people still on these apps purely for leisure, and people who are there to build something out of it. Both are valid, but the second camp has made the whole space stricter and more artificial, because outside of the people who are still there for fun, everyone wants to be a creator now. Everyone wants a camera pointed at them. And somewhere in that shift, we lost the actual point of why any of this existed: to share a thought, share an opinion, talk to people.

Nine years in, that's the dichotomy I keep sitting with. Not that social media got worse, exactly, just that it became something else entirely, and I got to know it before the change.