Why I Don’t Use Social Media is a three-part series exploring my relationship with online connection, how social networking slowly became social media, and why I eventually stepped away. This isn’t a rage-quit or a moral sermon. It’s simply an honest account of what changed, what was lost, and what I gained in the quiet.
In Part I, I talked about stepping away from social media without making a scene, and what I gained by simply stopping logging on. After that, I found myself thinking about why social media felt so draining in the first place. Part of it was personal, but part of it was historical. I remember an earlier version of the internet that felt more like a collection of places you chose to visit, rather than one endless feed you were expected to live inside.
There’s a particular kind of nostalgia people have for the early internet, and it’s often dismissed as the usual “back in my day” sentiment. The assumption is that if you miss it, you must be resisting change, failing to adapt, or romanticising a past that wasn’t as good as you remember.
But when I look back at the early years of social networking, the thing I miss isn’t the technology itself. It isn’t the graphics, or the clunky interfaces, or the fact that everything took longer. What I miss is the atmosphere. The texture. The feeling that the internet was made of smaller rooms rather than one giant stage.
Before “social media” became a thing, online socialising felt closer to real socialising. You turned up somewhere because you wanted to be there. You joined a space because you had something in common with the people inside it. You weren’t being funnelled into a feed and trained to scroll until your brain turned into static.
In a strange way, it felt more human.
Chat Rooms: Digital Rooms With Real People In Them
Some of my earliest experiences of social networking were in chat rooms, long before social media profiles became a default part of existing online. IRC, Yahoo! Chat, and other platforms like them were simple, almost blunt in design. You chose a topic, joined a room, and you were immediately dropped into a live conversation with strangers who were also there at that moment.
It sounds almost primitive now, but that simplicity was the entire point.
A chat room felt like walking into a pub or a cafe where you didn’t know anyone yet, but everyone had at least one shared interest. The rooms I found myself drawn to were usually related to computer games or music, and the magic was in the immediacy of it. People were talking because they were present. Conversations unfolded in real time. You’d meet strangers, then meet them again, and eventually they stopped being strangers.
And just like real social spaces, you’d get friendships and arguments, drama and in-jokes, and occasionally even romance, because human beings are human beings no matter what interface they happen to be using.
For me, as someone who didn’t have much of a real social life at the time, those spaces mattered. I was autistic, and face-to-face socialising often felt like walking through a minefield of invisible rules. Chat rooms felt safer. More manageable. More contained. There was still risk, because social interaction is always a risk, but it felt like a space where I could engage at my own pace without the same pressure of physical presence.
I genuinely loved those days.
Internet chat rooms still exist, and I even tried revisiting some of them years later out of curiosity. But the atmosphere was different, and so was the wider context. The people who once lived in those spaces had largely been pulled elsewhere.
Forums: Slower Conversation, Deeper Community
After chat rooms, another major era of online social networking came in the form of interest-based forums. These were often independent websites, running their own forum engines, with their own cultures, in-jokes, and long-standing community dynamics. If chat rooms were like pubs, forums were more like community halls with noticeboards, ongoing debates, and familiar faces.
The difference was tempo.
Chat was live and fast. Forums were slower, but that slowness was a strength. You could read a thread, think about it, come back later, and reply thoughtfully. You could contribute without needing to be “on” in the moment. That made discussions richer, and it also made them easier to engage with on your own terms.
Forums were also multi-purpose spaces. They weren’t just social hubs, they were information archives. If you wanted advice on something niche, you could ask a question and get answers from people who actually cared. Over time, the forum became a living reference library shaped by the interests of the people inside it.
Private messages mattered too. You could form genuine friendships through forums, and then take those friendships into quieter, more personal spaces. It wasn’t all public performance. There was a sense of layered social reality, where community existed in public threads, and connection could deepen privately.
Some of my strongest memories of that era include the Sinclair ZX Spectrum forum World of Spectrum, which felt like a gathering place for people who shared a specific kind of love for retro computing. I was also a member of a forum for a goth nightclub I used to frequent, Slimelight, which acted as an extension of the real-world scene. These weren’t faceless platforms. They were social worlds with their own gravity.
Looking back, what strikes me is that these spaces encouraged a kind of social continuity. People weren’t reduced to content, they were regular posters. Not followers, but familiar presences.
MySpace: Personality, Expression, and Casual Connection
Then came MySpace, and with it, something began to shift. It was still social networking, but it was more focused on the individual. MySpace gave you a space to customise, decorate, and shape. It wasn’t just a profile, it was a little public bedroom wall. A collage of taste and identity.
For me, the MySpace era felt like a bridge between my online persona and my real-life social world. It arrived during a time when the internet was becoming mainstream in a way it hadn’t been before. Suddenly, people who were never “computer people” were creating profiles, sharing their personality publicly, and expressing themselves online.
It was eye-opening, and it also made social connection feel oddly casual. People could add you, you could add them, and it didn’t necessarily feel like a desperate plea for approval. It felt more like saying hello across a room. You might not become close friends, but you were present in the same ecosystem.
It wasn’t perfect, and it had its own problems, but it still felt like something built around expression rather than optimisation. It felt messy in a human way.
This is also where I started noticing that the internet was becoming more centred on the individual, rather than purely on shared spaces. Not necessarily as a bad thing, but as a shift in emphasis.
The First Friction: Facebook and the Beginning of the Shift
Facebook entered my life while I was at university, and I still remember how strange its early rollout felt. For a while, it wasn’t even a global platform. It was introduced as something limited to university students, almost like it was trying to brand itself as a more “professional” or curated version of social networking.
What I remember most vividly is the social pressure. MySpace started being treated as outdated, and Facebook was framed as the thing everyone had to move to. It wasn’t presented as an optional new space, it was presented as the new default. If you wanted to maintain social contact online, you were expected to switch.
In its early years, Facebook wasn’t the worst, but I immediately felt a reduction in self-expression compared to MySpace. It was cleaner, more structured, and more uniform. Less personality. Less chaos. Less individuality. You were no longer decorating a space, you were occupying one, and the boundaries of that space weren’t yours to define.
In hindsight, this is where the larger shift began. Not necessarily because Facebook was uniquely evil, but because it marked the beginning of consolidation. Fewer independent rooms. Fewer niche communities with their own culture. More people funnelled into the same centralised ecosystem, following the same rules, shaped by the same interface.
Ironically, some of those “smaller rooms” did come back again later, but as part of the Facebook ecosystem itself. Things like Facebook Groups recreated the idea of smaller interest-based spaces, but the difference was that they weren’t independent anymore. They existed inside a single corporate environment with its own priorities, its own architecture, and its own invisible incentives.
The early internet felt like a collection of places you could choose to visit.
Facebook felt like a place you were expected to live.
Next: When Connection Became Content
This is where the timeline becomes less nostalgic and more unsettling. Because once social networking became centralised, and online identity became something you maintained publicly, the next step was almost inevitable.
In Part III, I’m going to explore what happened after this shift accelerated: the rise of memes and compressed communication, the arrival of image-based platforms like Instagram, the pressure on artists to become brands, and the moment “going viral” quietly transformed from an accident into a goal.