The Shocked Faces

Whenever a new friend follows my personal Instagram account, I always know what's coming. They glance down at their screen, their eyes go wide, and they just freeze.

15.6k posts.

Before they can even ask, I have my answer ready: "I got on it really early—way before it was popular, back before anyone even thought of it as a social platform."

Right next to that massive number sits another one: 800 followers. That's simply because I never tried to build an audience, and most of those eight hundred people are just friends I've made along the way over the years.

Looking at it from today's perspective, fifteen thousand posts looks slightly unhinged, like an obsession or the output of a full-time social media manager. But to me, it's just the quiet paper trail of an ordinary life, piling up years before anyone cared about algorithms or going viral.

Back when I first got online, the word "social" meant something completely different. It wasn't about the gaze of strangers. It was about the people closest to me: my family far away, and a handful of real friends.

Travel Diaries in PowerPoint

My online life didn't start with feeds and follower counts. Back in Taiwan, as I wrote in Nowhere Near the Ivy League, getting online meant listening to the screech and static of a dial-up modem. There was no social media. Online life happened on text-only BBS bulletin boards—essentially Taiwan's early version of Reddit—in chat rooms, on ICQ, and later on MSN Messenger. It was an era built entirely on plain text.

The urge to share really kicked in when I moved to Denver for graduate school. It was my first time living abroad, and every day threw something brand new at me. I wanted my friends and family back home to see what I was seeing, but chatting apps back then couldn't handle much more than text. So I turned my travel diaries into PowerPoint decks. I dropped photos onto slides, typed out my stories right next to them, and emailed the presentations home one by one. It was basically my own personal newsletter. For everything else, we just chatted on MSN Messenger.

Later on, I moved to New York, right around the time Facebook was born. Invites kept trickling into my inbox, one after another. At first, I assumed they were all spam and ignored them. But since they were coming from people around me, and more and more of my friends were joining, curiosity finally won. I signed up, and found myself riding the very first wave of social media without even trying. My friends list grew, but it was made up entirely of people I knew in the US. There wasn't a single person from Taiwan on there, because the trend hadn't crossed the Pacific yet.

Once people back home finally caught on, Facebook became a genuine lifeline for someone living on the other side of the world. All I had to do was post an update, and everyone knew how I was doing. Without it, I suspect I would have lost touch with a lot of the people in my life.

Maybe that's why the word "social" has always stayed anchored in my mind as an inner circle: a living room for real friends, not a stage in front of strangers.

In Search of a Polaroid Filter on an iPhone 3

Later, I moved to Hong Kong and started writing a blog (a real blog this time, not PowerPoint files clogging my friends' inboxes). Instagram arrived right around then, and at first, it wasn't "social" at all.

I had an iPhone 3 back then. Smartphones couldn't do nearly as much, and built-in photo editing didn't exist yet. I wanted my photos to have that warm, vintage Polaroid look before I put them on my blog or shared them in a Facebook post. I experimented with a few photography apps and eventually landed on Instagram, simply because it was straightforward and had great filters.

To me, it was just a photo filter tool. It certainly wasn't a social platform.

Back then, an Instagram post could only hold a single photo. If I wanted to share several shots from an afternoon, I had to publish them as several separate posts. Posting one photo at a time is the real reason my post count ballooned into the thousands. Without my planning it, the app turned into an open photo album for keeping in touch with friends, even though I never actually liked using it for photo storage—you couldn't group an event's photos into proper albums.

Years slipped by, and while I wasn't paying attention, Instagram quietly turned into what everyone now calls social media. The first time a new friend asked me for my IG, I froze for a second. So people don't add each other on Facebook anymore? They ask for IG? I wondered if the younger generation just thought Instagram was cooler. I've also noticed that younger people use Instagram as their primary messaging app instead of WhatsApp—which actually feels a lot like how we used Facebook and Facebook Messenger back in the day.

A Hundred Stories and a Message from Mom

When Stories first appeared, I took the name completely literally. If it's called a story, shouldn't it tell a story? So I laid out my photos in chronological order, narrating what happened step by step so people could follow along. Whenever I saw someone post just a random meme or a single detached picture, it struck me as so odd. How on earth is a meme a "story"?

Every so often, my OCD would kick in, and I'd post a hundred Stories in a single stretch. Leaving a story unfinished just makes me uncomfortable.

Naturally, I noticed that almost nobody tapped all the way to the end. Fair enough: it was information overload, and people's thumbs probably got tired. I noticed the drop-off, but I never changed a thing. I wasn't running an influencer account; this was just my online album for friends and family. In my stubborn mind, anyone who truly cared about me would tap through to the end. (Though looking back, that was probably wishful thinking.)

There was another reason I loved posting all those Stories: saving them into Highlights finally satisfied my urge to organize my photos into albums.

Those posts had one more essential job: they let my family and friends know what I was up to, sparing me the friction of phone calls and small talk. Whenever I traveled abroad, posting photos on Facebook every day—and later, stringing together Instagram Stories—was my proof of life. It was my signal that I hadn't been kidnapped, hadn't had an accident, and was having the time of my life.

I remember one trip to Iceland when our schedule ran late. Before I even had the chance to post that evening's photos on Facebook, my mom had already messaged me, worried that something had happened to me.

Those posts and Stories were never "content." They were how I told my family I was safe.

A Feed Full of Strangers

Eventually, the whole premise of social media shifted. It stopped being an intimate circle for keeping up with friends and became a stage for chasing strangers' attention and engineering virality.

At first, posts and videos from strangers started showing up in my Facebook feed. I didn't really mind. It was an easy way to stumble across interesting articles and fun stories. Not bad at all.

Then that shift came for Instagram. One day, my friend Cherry complained to me that her feed was suddenly packed with posts from strangers, and she couldn't see her friends' lives anymore. She couldn't understand what had happened to the place.

At first, I found it annoying too. But eventually, I adapted, just like I had with Facebook. These days, I watch strangers' videos on Instagram too, whether for entertainment or to pick up interesting tips.

Still, I've noticed how differently the younger generation uses the app. They rarely post to their grid anymore; they almost exclusively post Stories. I often wonder why. Is it because a Story disappears after twenty-four hours, leaving no permanent footprint, so it feels more private?

For me, Instagram and Facebook have always been photo albums where I keep my memories, shared with the people I know. So why would I need to keep it private?

My Own Stubbornness

People often see me as trendy, someone who's always early to the next wave, because I embraced social media long before most. Some of my friends back in Taiwan still don't touch Instagram, or haven't even bothered downloading WhatsApp.

From PowerPoint decks in Denver and the first wave of Facebook in New York, to fiddling with Polaroid filters on an iPhone 3, I was right there on the front lines.

But I know I have my own stubborn streak. Getting the attention of strangers was never my goal. I never thought about pleasing an algorithm, and I never wanted to perform for strangers.

I only wanted my friends far away to see the view in front of me, and my mom to know, every day, that I was safe.

All these years later, that account is still what it was when I first found it: a quiet living room kept for family and friends, and a photo album left open on the coffee table.

15.6k posts, 800 followers.