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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

Should we be using them at all? Yes, probably. Being able to connect with my friends and peers digitally was a mindblowing experience in high school. The problem is social media has pivoted away from social connection and been entirely re-focused on media consumption. Honestly, at this point I want Myspace back.

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Wait, you are old enough to remember MySpace, but young enough to have had social media in high school (I assume on a smartphone)? I didn’t realize that those two things overlapped.

Not on smart phones because iPhone came out in 2007 but I remember when Facebook opened to the general public in 2006. I was in high school at the time and we were all still on Myspace when our older friends had graduated, gone to university, and were able to sign up for Facebook with their school emails. The FOMO at the time was real.

My Facebook is on a separate e-mail because I first signed up during the period you had to have your high school network verify you. I had transferred into the school, so the first try through no one recognized me.

There were smart phones before the iPhone.

I am in this group. I scraped together enough cash for a smartphone my senior year of high school (2009-2010). Before that, I used AIM and Twitter via SMS. And uploaded photos to Facebook via MMS, I believe.

Graduated high school in '08, had myspace (and feature phones), msn etc., at the start and by the end had early smartphones, facebook etc. Hiptop (sidekick in the US?) were quite popular too.

Most access was still from a PC though

Graduated high school in 2007 in Slovenia. Saw the heyday of public IRC chatrooms (city based), tail end of MySpace, heyday of personal blogs, the beginnings of Facebook, but Twitter took off like wildfire in our corner of the world. Everyone was on twitter, especially tech enthusiasts. My Twitter account dates to July 2008.

My Instagram user ID is sub 1,000,000 :)

The really cool kids in college had hacked iPhones from Italy and USA. I think iPhone 5 was the first officially available for us ... I managed to import an iPhone 4 but missed the jailbreak by 3 days and couldn't use cellular on my phone for years. It was basically an expensive iPod touch. Good times.

We mainly used desktop computers.

I had a myspace in 1st grade (as did all my friends), and I graduated highschool in ‘17

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