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Ward Christensen and Randy Suess introduced CBBS, the first public dial-up bulletin-board system. This innovation laid the groundwork for local online communities and was a significant contributor to the emergence of early message-board culture. -
Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis’s Usenet introduced decentralized, threaded discussions which became a model for forums and early community norms. -
Quantum Link / Q-Link (which evolved into America Online) brought dial-up internet and easy user interfaces to households, popularizing online chatrooms, profiles, and mass onboarding. -
GeoCities democratized web publishing (neighborhoods of personal pages), letting non-tech users create personal sites and shaping early web identity/communities. -
Friendster was an early mainstream social network that used friend of a friend connections to help people discover others and showed how social graphs could scale. -
MySpace was the first customizable social profile and music hub to blow up, creating profile personalization, fan communities, and early influencer culture! -
Mark Zuckerberg launched Thefacebook at Harvard. Facebook scaled the idea of personal networks into a global identity platform that reshaped social ties online -
YouTube’s 2005 debut made video sharing easy and mainstream, creating creator culture, viral videos, and a new media economy. -
Twitter popularized micro-blogging and real-time public conversations, changing live reporting, event chatter, and short-form discourse -
Facebook’s News Feed changed how people consume friends’ activity, moving users from profile visits to a centralized, constantly updating stream and sparking major privacy -
Chris Messina suggested the use of the # sign on Twitter (Aug 23, 2007); hashtags then became a universal way to group content, mobilize movements, and track trends across platforms. -
Tumblr combined blogging with social networking, allowing users to easily post multimedia content and reblog others’ posts. It became a hub for niche communities, fandoms, and early meme culture, influencing internet subcultures for years. -
Instagram launched Oct 6, 2010 as a mobile-first photo app with filters, quickly transforming visual self-presentation and influencer marketing. -
Snapchat’s “My Story” introduced ephemeral 24-hour Stories that reshaped casual sharing and were later copied by Instagram/Facebook as a core format -
The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge (summer 2014) went globally viral on social platforms, demonstrating how networks can rapidly amplify fundraising and meme culture -
“The Dress” meme went viral on Twitter and Tumblr, showing how image perception and debates could spread globally overnight. -
Musical.ly launched in 2014, but it was acquired and rebranded as TikTok in September 2016 by ByteDance. TikTok popularized short-form, algorithm-driven videos and global viral trends, redefining online creativity and influencer culture. -
The social media frenzy that surrounded the Fyre Festival's Instagram-perfect marketing became viral totally due to the road show’s disastrous execution after weeks of dramatic failures. The publicity emphasized more the influencer marketing phase of direction and notes there are risks in influencer culture. -
After the killing of George Floyd, social media shone a spotlight on protests, resources, and education around systemic racism and showcasing how these channels help and develop activism and awareness campaigns. -
On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA, was shot and killed in the middle of speaking at Utah Valley University in Utah. The suspect, 22 year old Tyler Robinson, who police later identified as the shooter, shot Kirk from a rooftop and fled on foot. The shooting led to condemnation across the political spectrum and renewed discussions about political violence and radicalization via the internet.