Category
6 articles
Between 2010 and 2012, an entire generation of teenagers decided that the best use of social media was photographing themselves lying rigidly on top of increasingly dangerous objects, then immediately pivoting to crouching like birds on those same objects. It was absurd, it was contagious, and it was somehow the direct ancestor of every TikTok trend that followed. We need to talk about planking.
Before TikTok dances and Instagram Reels, people were lying face-down on escalator handrails and crouching on mailboxes like sentient birds — and the entire internet was obsessed with it. Planking, Owling, Horsemaning, and their many bizarre cousins defined an era of physical comedy that required nothing but a camera, zero self-consciousness, and a complete disregard for personal safety. Here's how we got there, and why we kind of miss it.
Before Twitter beef and Instagram clout, there was Club Penguin — a frozen island where millions of kids logged on, waddled around, and accidentally learned everything there is to know about online social dynamics. It was chaotic, wholesome, and somehow more emotionally resonant than half the apps we use today. Disney killed it in 2017, and honestly? We're still not over it.
Long before Instagram made oversharing aspirational, millions of Americans were anonymously posting their most mortifying moments to websites that promised nothing except a community of strangers who would vote on how bad your day actually was. FMyLife, My Life Is Average, and their chaotic cousins were a weird, warm, and deeply human corner of the early internet — and we kind of miss them desperately.
If you plugged a headset into an Xbox 360 controller between roughly 2008 and 2013, you experienced something that modern gaming has entirely sanitized out of existence: the completely unfiltered, emotionally volatile, occasionally transcendent chaos of the online multiplayer lobby. It was loud, it was often terrible, and somehow — in the way that only truly unmoderated spaces can be — it was also kind of magical. Pour one out for a culture that could never survive 2024.
From SuperWhoLock crossover fanfic to shipping wars that genuinely felt like international incidents, Tumblr between 2010 and 2014 was its own sovereign nation with its own customs, its own language, and absolutely zero chill. We went back to document the madness — and honestly, we kind of want to go back.