Social Psychology with Jeff

Hi All,

I am going to detour from the original purpose of this blog to document stories from my life that are slowly fading away. Most stories are ordinary and non-unique overall, but they all influenced the person who I am today. This story is set in mid-2000s when I was in high school and when many of use used Myspace.

Today, the internet is organized and relatively centralized. Photos and moments from life are posted to Instagram and Snapchat, stories and updates from life are posted on Facebook, yelling into the void is saved for Twitter, and message-board communications  occurs on Reddit.

But in the mid-2000s, all of that occurred on Myspace. Everyone raced to create a page outlining who they were, their favorite music (remember those music players), their favorite things to do and media to consume, and their top-8 friends–which then became a top-12, top-16, and top-whatever list. People would message friends about what was going on in their lives (akin to Facebook), post pictures of whatever was happening in their lives (akin to Instagram/Snapchat), meet people with common interests or hobbies  to form groups (akin to Reddit and as would be expected by social identity theory), and post bulletin posts that would let everyone in their friend list know what was going on with their lives (akin to Twitter).

Here is one of those stories. One of the common themes that people would organize their groups around is when they would graduate from high school or college. There would be a few groups each for current high school students graduating in the upcoming years. Having graduated in 2008, I joined one of the groups centered around those who were graduating high school in 2008.

These groups were plentiful, but they were relatively generic in terms of content. They would consist of posts asking advice about classes, teachers, or friends. They would also consist of online versions of games that probably have been around forever (e.g., hot or not, 1-10 ratings, date or not, or basically anything involving self-esteem and attraction). There were other posts or threads that involved fun but superficial topics as well.

What made this group different was one of the threads that occurred in this group. There was a person who, for whatever reason, decided to see if there could be a thread that was posted that could get more replies than the number of group members in the group. It was titled “A Little Game for the Class of 2008.” At the start of the thread, there were maybe 6,000 members in this group. Replies would be posted in a linear pattern, but group members would also add themselves in a linear pattern. There was also an agreed-upon rule that none of the posts could be low effort or similar to any of the other posts in the group. So now, the task was to get not only thousands of posts to surpass the number of group members, but it was also to have as many authentic posts as possible to reach the goal.

I think I joined the MySpace group when the post was in the high 1,000s or low 2,000s. At this point, there were 6,000 people in the group. The norms of no low-effort posts were actually kept, so the thread turned into a mix of surprisingly in depth conversations about life. People talked about concerns with others, ideas that they had, how they could improve some aspect of their life, and mundane but meaningful small-talk. Conversations would start and stop depending on topics and needs, but the 30 or so people who regularly would check the post would try to keep it going every day.

This continued for 15 months. Real friendships formed in this thread, where teenagers met at the intersection of busy and bored. The posts would go up, the relationships would increase, people would join and leave the thread, and time would go on. But as both the thread and group members grew linearly, the thread was almost always about 2000 to 3000 posts below the group member count. the conversations were good and sustainable, and the friends became close friends.

Then one day, I get home from school and get a comment from one of the friends that I met in the thread. They said something to the effect of: “Hey, go look at what happened in the thread. I think you’ll like it!” So I go to the thread, and one of the other posters had spend the entire night posting “die hard determination!” Looking back at it, it must have been individually posted somewhere between 1000 and 2000 times. With that bump, it was now possible for the goal of the original thread to happen.

So we scheduled a time for all of us to get online in the next day to have the post that would be “group members +1,” and then we contacted the posters from the early part of the thread to let them know that a half-planned idea was actually going to succeed. We then waited 24 hours until everyone could join the next day to see this happen–an accomplishment that, for a brief moment, made our lives better.

The day came and went, and the goal was met. We showed up at the time, posted in excitement waiting for the goal to be met, and then we realized that we reached our goal. Months of preparation, conversation, and friendship led to an afternoon of excitement and congratulations from those who stuck around, and it led to shout-outs from early posters about the goal actually happening.

As with most things in life though, the moment became a memory. There was an attempt to do it again, but we all decided that the initial magic and motivation were gone. Once the goal was met, the conversations in the thread died up–to the point that the members then overtook the thread reply count, and there was minimal motivation to get the postings back above the membership count. Then, the group got merged with another Class of 2008 group that was less maintained and everyone went away from the group. Then MySpace lost market share to Facebook, and a company that was purchased for $580 Million saw sold for $35 million. Sometimes, I wonder if anyone else would remember these events if I told this story to anyone else. Sometimes, I wonder what their reaction would be.

It is now 13 years later. I still talk to two people from those days, but the conversations and friendship morphed from one that would occur in high school to one that occurs in the late 20s. The event itself was meaningful because it was mundane: a group of people came together to accomplish a goal and disbanded (mostly) after the goal was completed and moved on with their lives. I wonder how often this happens.