As social media increasingly feels like a draining, addictive performance, users are turning away from curation culture – embracing casual spam posts and nostalgic, sepia-toned filters instead
Scrolling on Instagram today has become akin to being on LinkedIn: there are multiple professional announcements from people you don’t know, and an abundance of pristine, almost professionally curated photos and videos. But before all the curated, algorithmised feeds and paid Influencer posts, there was once a time when Instagram actually felt like a place to connect with friends and family. After the app officially launched in 2010, the years that followed were a blurry haze of latte art boomerangs, VSCO lens flare street scenes and sepia-hued selfies. The world was tinted through vintage yellow, and every element of daily life was “feed-worthy”. Even Kendall Jenner’s viral heart hair moment, lying on the floor, felt somewhat spontaneous.
Many things culturally and politically have changed drastically since those years. Social media is no longer about sharing your life with those you love; it’s about personal branding, virality and posting to attract masses of people you don’t know in person. But what if there was a way we could connect back to the essence of OG Instagram?
Recently, there have been inklings of an aesthetic return that’s scratching at the idea of old social media. We see this when Addison Rae posts blurry flower photos and King Kylie-reminiscent oversaturated pink hair flicks. Also, we see it with musicians like Steve Lacy and Justin Bieber, who have started to post multiple times a day, doing away with a more curated social image. On TikTok, teens post fake moustache finger tattoos and share tips for editing their photos to look like 2010 filters, hashtagged with #TumblrAesthetic and the year #2014. Whether it’s through “millennial maxxing” or millennial-core videos, the aesthetic of pre-influencer Instagram has become an idealised visual marker of a time when you could graduate college and work at Buzzfeed. Of course, numerous atrocities were still happening across the world at that time, but it was an era in digital history where many people still felt like social media was fun, maybe even hopeful.
Fast forward to today, when the average student will spend 25 years on their phone throughout their lifetime. With over half of all adults (52 per cent) feeling overwhelmed by the pressure to stay up to date with social media, being online no longer feels like an enjoyable choice, but an addictive necessity. “When people first started using Instagram, everyone was exploring the edges of the platform with fun selfies and quirked up vignettes, trying to figure out what the rules were and what they could get away with,” says Sean Thielen-Esparza, an independent technologist in Brooklyn. “The level of polish has evolved with what was rewarded by the algorithm; it became work for some, and now it’s a muddy space where it’s encouraged to be more professional.” Recently, however, Thielen-Esparza says we’ve reached an “inflection point” of peak performativeness.
There was something cosy about OG Instagram, where you could see hyperlocal narratives, environments and relationships. What people are missing is intimacy; they are like, ‘Who are all these thousands of random people, and why am I shouting into a void?’
As being on Instagram (and social media in general) shifted from feeling like optional and casual fun to a draining performance, Thielen-Esparza says we’re currently witnessing a cultural rebellion of photo dumps, filters and deep-fried memes. “It’s a rebellion and a response to the polish and constraints,” he says. Feeling fatigued or less inspired by an app is bound to happen over time, but Thielen-Esparza says he thinks people are yearning not only for an old version of Instagram, but also a revert back to the purpose of the social platforms altogether: social media actually being social. “There was something cosy about OG Instagram, where you could see hyperlocal narratives, environments and relationships,” he says. “What people are missing is intimacy; they are like, ‘Who are all these thousands of random people, and why am I shouting into a void?’”
Some people are searching for a Tumblr-era level of intimacy across other platforms, especially blogging platforms, like Silk, Arena and even Substack. Still, Thielen-Esparza says he doubts we can ever get back to the cosy practicality of OG Instagram. “I think the platform’s incentives have changed too much,” he says. “There‘s literally zero incentive for a closed network.” Because of this, we’re currently seeing the nostalgia play out purely aesthetically through creating (and even monetising) the feeling of something being unfiltered, even if it is still curated. This familiar comfort is the same reason why Charli xcx’s Brat album rollout made waves online last year. “It was what young people were hungry for, it had grit and it showed,” says trend forecaster Samantha Hince. “It played on this messy culture of being young and having fun, something I think was lacking in youth culture for a while.”
Influencer culture has made many young people feel that if they just perfected their online brand, all doors could swing open for them. We have seen it happen in the past, but we also now know it’s hardly a viable career path or attainable or accessible way of living for everyone. For those who long for friendship and connection over virality and fame, Hince says that chasing curation and perfection is starting to feel out of touch. “After years of trying to reach the same standard as influencers in our posts, we’ve created a version of ourselves we can’t live up to, and that is not attainable,” she says. “I think people are looking for an escape that feels good, and we all know social media rarely makes us feel good.” This escape is starting to play out through the form of visually referencing a previous version of social media – where posting was about sharing and you didn’t have to worry about distinguishing between actual recommendations and sponsored deals, between AI videos and real posts.
Throwing back to the appearance of OG Instagram may be a necessary visual escape, but the apps are no longer the same, and neither are we. Akili, a 23-year-old creative strategist, says he posted a throwback filter recently simply because he thought it looked interesting. “I’m not sure many young people want old Instagram back, because we can’t really remember it,” he says. “I think it’s more about people wanting to post more and more.” Erasing curation culture from our minds would take even longer than an app update. “Unfiltered feeds will be on the rise, still curated but in a more authentic, less polished way, particularly among younger generations,” says Hince. “At the same time, perfectionism is going nowhere; it’s two sides of the same coin because we live in an increasingly polarised world, where extremes are more visible.” As even influencers themselves begin to post brand deals through the lens of OG Instagram-reminiscent nostalgia, it’s a contrast we will be scrolling through for the foreseeable future.