The Kids Will Tell You Exactly What You’re Doing Wrong

If you’re over twenty-one, you are already retired from social media in any culturally meaningful sense. The teenagers have moved on from whatever you think you understand, established entirely new rules, and sorted themselves into hierarchies you’ll never fully decode. Snapchat, Instagram, YouTube, Musical.ly, YouNow, Periscope—just listing the platforms gives me a headache, and I barely use half of them correctly.

Which is why it was refreshing to watch Wired do the obvious thing and simply ask some actual teenagers. Two sisters explained, with the weary patience of people talking to a confused uncle, that food photos on Instagram are completely over, how often you should post Stories to Snapchat before becoming annoying, and exactly where the line between presence and desperation sits. Another girl made the calm, seemingly obvious case for never sending nude photos to anyone.

That last piece of advice, she noted, is the one almost nobody actually follows. Which tracks. The rest of it—the unwritten etiquette, the invisible frequency rules, the sense that each platform has its own social physics—feels genuinely alien to me, the way all subcultures feel alien until you’re inside them. These kids aren’t confused about what they’re doing. They have a taxonomy. We’re the ones stumbling around in the dark and calling it a feed.