You may have noticed your Instagram feed was flooded with throwbacks to 2016 last week. Over-edited selfies, Snapchat puppy dog filters, and OOTDs in front of brightly colored walls.

Which begs the question: why is everyone so obsessed with 2016 again?

When Social Media Was an Escape

In 2016, social media was fun.

Sure, we were a little performative. We did things “for the ’gram.” (I once took a 45-minute Uber in San Francisco just to go to a coffee shop that served a rainbow latte I had to get a photo of for Instagram.)

But it didn’t feel like work.

Instagram was a creative outlet. A place to experiment, express yourself, and meet new people.

Fast forward a decade, and being offline is now considered a luxury.

People are quite literally paying for devices that lock them out of their phones, scheduling “no-scroll” hours, and actively trying to escape the platforms they once used to escape real life.

So, what happened?

People like to say we took social media less seriously in 2016, but we’d have to politely disagree. After all, this was the era of meticulously planned Instagram grids, cohesive color palettes, and carefully chosen filters so every post fit perfectly into the puzzle.

(Trust us, we would know. Planoly was founded in 2016 for exactly this reason.)

We spent days crafting a single post. Writing captions. Choosing filters. Deciding what felt right to share.

It wasn’t that we cared less. It was that the process felt more fulfilling.

From Self-Expression to Self-Optimization

Today, the energy is very different.

You might see six TikTok posts a day from your favorite creator. Every brand caption sounds vaguely the same. Every post is optimized for reach, retention, and conversion.

There’s less humanity behind each piece of content, and more pressure than ever to perform. To keep up. To feed the algorithm. To post daily (or multiple times a day). To sell constantly.

Social media has shifted from a place of self-expression to a tool for self-optimization.

We went from posting for fun to posting for performance.
Instead of creating content for our friends, we’re creating for the algorithm.

And people can feel it.

What We’re Really Nostalgic For

The nostalgia for 2016 isn’t about the actual trends, it’s about craving a version of social media that felt more creative and rewarding. It’s a reaction to burnout and the pressure of always needing to “do more” online.

People don’t want to rewind the internet. They want permission to enjoy it again.

At the end of the day, social media will never look exactly like it did ten years ago. The algorithms aren’t magically reverting. And while the ability to monetize content has created incredible opportunities, it’s also fundamentally changed how these platforms work.

What we can do is try to make social media fun again. Stop putting pressure on every post to perform.

That doesn’t mean abandoning your strategy altogether. Batch and schedule your main pillar posts, then leave room for experimentation. Spend an afternoon at a coffee shop planning your grid. Use fun Canva templates to switch things up. Start doing things just “for the gram” again.

And remember: not everything needs to be optimized. Some things are worth creating just for the joy of it.