At What Age Did You Start Using Social Media?

15 give or take. I began using a MySpace clone called Hi5, then MSN messenger and then Facebook.

Oh nice! I started using Facebook when I was 11, then at 15 I made accounts on Hi5 and Yahoo (but I later deleted Hi5), and at 17 I created an Instagram account. I’ve forgotten the passwords to my old accounts, and for the last 2 years I haven’t made any new accounts. Social media can be annoying—losing passwords, hacked accounts, jealousy, and unfollows. Honestly, it can be negative in life.

There was no "Social Media" comparable to the ones we have nowadays in my youth, I'm already an adult when Myspace rolled in although I did had a now abandoned livejournal in the early 2000s

I understand. Do you prefer life without social media now?

Do forums count? Then at the age of 22, when I first got online. That was the main form of socialization in 1999, or at least the most accessible. Must have acquired an XMPP account sometimes in 2003-2004.

I was a bit of a late adopter of social media as far as 30-somethings go, I think I made my FB account at like... 14 or 15? And I was never allowed to have MySpace or the like, unfortunately. I was surprisingly disconnected from social media, and at this point I've gotten rid of or never got into most of the major websites in favor of the smaller stuff like this - even if I never really use this site like I'd thought I would lol

I got my first ever phone when I was 4, but it was one of thos Windows phone back in 2014 so I didn't really know how to use it. Social media started at the age of 8 when I got my old Huaweii for Pokemon Go and I created my YouTube channel, after that Snapchat and Instagram, way too young to be in the internet and I had freedom on the internet because my mom didn't really modorated what I was doing, just trusted that I'll be fine. Used to think this was a flex back in the day which it isn't.

Cool! I’ve never used XMPP, was it like MSN or Yahoo Messenger?

@NosyCat

I understand, social media can get boring. I didn’t use it much either, but I had accounts when I was 11–18. Now I don’t really feel like staying on socials, but I like SpaceHey. I made a new account there about 6 months ago. I’ve also used Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok, and SpaceHey, but I enjoy just staying there and reading comments lol.

@*J4d3_H4rpy*

Wow, you started really young! Do you still use YouTube, Snapchat, or Instagram now, or did you move to other platforms?

@iilimato

I'll count deviantart as social media. I used that only for really long time.

I was around 14 and thank god. 

i was in the 5th grade when i joined social media 

Ooh nice I never used DeviantArt, but I’m on Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok and Spacehey. Not really into Facebook or Instagram.

@⋆｡ﾟ☁︎｡⋆｡ LG ﾟ☾ ﾟ｡⋆ ˘ᗜ˘

Oh nice 👍 I was 11 when I first used social media, but I lost my old accounts. From 19 to 27 I didn’t really use social media. I’m not a big fan of it, but I do use Twitter, Tumblr, TikTok and Spacehey.

@𝓟𝓡𝓘𝓝𝓒𝓐🎀

@Diana I guess? I used both Yahoo! Messenger and XMPP from Pidgin anyway. But XMPP is an open, federated protocol, so it can only die when the last fan shuts down the last server. So it never went away, while people struggle to revive MSN or AIM via unofficial, reverse-engineered servers.

Wow, I didn’t know the difference between open protocols and closed ones. Do you run your own XMPP server or just use a client?

@NosyCat 

Age 8 if we're counting AOL/Yahoo chatrooms and forums, Age 11 if we're only counting "actual" sites! My mom made my first Myspace page for me back in 2006, it was the start to what has turned into a 19 year addiction... (ᗒᗣᗕ)՞

I was 14 and I can double check because the only reason I went onto social media was because my mom and I were starting this brand new game and it was like 'check out our socials' and I was like 'yoooo I love this series I wanna do that!' and that's why I spend a majority of my waking time on youtube now or having it in the background lolol

That’s so nostalgic! Do you still remember what your Myspace page looked like?

@⚝dorkheadrae⚝ 

Lol that’s such a fun reason to start! Once you get into YouTube it’s hard to stop What kind of videos do you usually watch?

@emil 

I don't really consider anything prior to MySpace social media. I became familiar with IRC at a pretty young age. Used a lot of forums, even was exposed to some BBSes, chat websites throughout the late 90s, messengers such as AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN, and then some web platforms that had profiles with community engagement. Perhaps NeoPets is a good example, I made an account and was using it as far back as 2000 as well as Newgrounds in 2001. I personally consider MySpace the first real social media platform I signed up for. Which I made my first account in 2004. I was a teenager in high school during this time. I continued to use MySpace up until the redesign happened. I absolutely hated it. I also really hated the fact that Facebook overtook MySpace in popularity which made no sense to me at the time as it lacked the customization features. Bebo was the next social media platform I ended up using from 2005 to 2010 which I even thought it was a much better social media platform than Facebook. Of course there was many others I tried out over the years going more into the mid to late 2000s. Then even throughout the first half of the 2010s. I started to feel a major drain on things around 2015. I was using them less. A lot of the forums I was using either were gone or became, "ghost towns". Still looking for some to fill the void over using social media. But the culture just isn't quite what it used to be. Although I still prefer it. Tried out Discord when it was starting to really grow in popularity. Originally I was hooked as it brought back feelings of a modern sense of how I used Yahoo! Messenger at a time. Or at least reminded me of that at first. Quickly things began to change. I also quit using a lot of platforms the more privacy invasive they became. Requiring phone numbers, real identities instead of pseudonyms, and I guess I was just getting tired of the modern web more with each passing day. I was already feeling nostalgia for "the old web" even earlier in the decade. I became disgusted with YouTube and just quit uploading there entirely which was something else I got involved with in the mid 2000s. I quit using pretty much every social media platform throughout the decade then by towards the end of the decade and was only using forums, IRC, and contacting people via email. Then I came across Windows93 and made an account on MySpace93. Once that was discontinued I did make an account on here but didn't stick around long. I ended up deleting my account as I was just kind of shutting myself off from everything and everyone during that time period due to some personal issues. Been trying to figure out ways to reach back out and socialize online again but in a manner that still somewhat respects my usecase for what a social media platform should be. I know this place even has it's own issues with privacy and everything but at least it's still a place I can separate my personal life and my online one. Also it's nice to mess around with HTML/CSS again after a while. I definitely plan on working on my page a lot more and having fun with it. May even get a new personal page up and running after not messing with one in a while on something such as Neocities.

Something else that turned me away from social media was the pure integration to phones. I preferred a platform called DailyBooth over Instagram. I was always someone who'd rather have more control over what I could do using a browser on my computer instead of a dedicated app. A lot of phone stuff going on in the late 2000s and early 2010s I just couldn't really get into due to these reasons. It just simply wasn't for me. I also just would have rather used my digital cameras and then upload to my computer to do some photo editing on a program instead of snapping a picture with a phone and being stuck with what limited filters or options that was available. I attempted to try things out as I was YouTuber and doing all sorts of projects at that point in my life. I was making myself more and more miserable and going against my own belief systems. I was a private person giving all of that away and going against my principals. I noticed that more and more as I tried to jump on the gaming channel and streaming bandwagon when all the big names were starting to get noticed. My projects and short films wasn't going anywhere anymore and I forced this change out of attempts to be relevant. That had a lot of to do with why I doubled down on quitting a lot of it and even going to what some people may consider extremes. Quitting next to all social media or anything attached to who I really was. Going back to my roots with wanting to separate my real life and my digital life. Not using a smartphone anymore or a phone rather at all for years. Now I just stick with a flip phone that I barely touch. It definitely impacted my personal life as I ended up losing all of my friends IRL. It showed me that my friends weren't really my friends at all. Nobody wanted to reach out to me through a landline phone number, or wanted to assoiciate with me once I lost my local stardom of being a YouTuber, thought if I didn't have a Facebook account I was a weirdo, and much more that happened as I quit platform after platform. Even once I got a flip phone it didn't make a difference and I even attempted to reach out through text messages. I just think it's sad in certain circumstances how social media does impact people's personal lives and has such a control grip on things in society. They stopped being fun, creative, and a way to express yourself in a way that best fits the user. Also I regret a lot that I did over the years on them. I used to always look at the internet as needing to be it's own entity and a way to escape the bullshit in someone's life for a while. Not blurring in the problems of real life. Seems next to impossible to get that magic back these days.

Sorry for rambling on about all of this. I just hope maybe someone reading can understand where I'm coming from and maybe even can relate or get something out of it.