Cast your millennial minds back to the year 2006. Social media is in its infancy, and you might even still be using a dial-up modem to access it on your PC. Mercifully, only a few people outside of Silicon Valley have heard of Mark Zuckerberg – but you and all your teenage peers know exactly what MySpace founder Tom Anderson looks like. That’s because, as soon as you sign up to his website, a photo of Anderson posing in front of a whiteboard covered in scribbles appears in your “Top Eight” friends list by default.
If you came of age some time in the mid-Noughties, then the words “Top Eight” probably alternately fill you with warm nostalgia and chilly horror. Each profile on the rudimentary social media platform’s website featured a showcase of that user’s eight best friends, in a list ranked by how much they liked them. And if you were really good at rudimentary HTML, like one of my inner circle? You could code your page in such a way that no one else could see your ranking, allowing you to be even more honest (read: brutal) about your roster. We felt revolutionary, like trailblazing women in STEM, but we were actually just devious and a bit petty.
