teenager posts

one of my most vivid memories from middle school is sitting around with my friends near our lockers, looking at teenagerposts.tumblr.com and screenshotting our favorites to save as our ipod touch lockscreens.  For a moment, teenagerposts was the pinnacle of humor and relatability, but their 15 seconds of internet fame has long been over.  

Teenagerposts was started in 2011, but by 2013, the hyper-saturated appeal of their posts had faded as blogs began to shift towards more minimalist aesthetics.  By 2016, each of their posts would only receive a few hundred notes when prior they'd get thousands.  As evinced by the iconic "hahaha I do that" vine posted the same year, relatable humor was dead. 

Nonetheless, teenagersposts kept chugging away, but cracks began to show on August 7th, 2017.  What was once a wall of neon text posts became interspersed with twitter screenshots and other reblogs:

the last teenagerpost—post #26,178—was posted on september 29th, 2017 without any kind of warning or commemoration.  the blog is still somewhat active though; it was last updated this past June.  

however, the teenagerposts era is most certainly over.  This type of overly relatable humor is passé, dare I say even cringe—though I want to resist that urge.  

It's clear that when the blog was first started in October 2011, they were an early adopter to tumblr trends and the next generation of confessional text post blogs originally popularized by postsecret.  The internet loves a good confession, and teenagerposts said the things we were all thinking, but didn't say out loud.  

As a thirteen year old in 2012, teenagerposts made me realize that I wasn't alone; the thoughts and insecurities I was deeply embarrassed about actually weren't that embarrassing.  They were normal.  The thousands of notes on each concurred.

As what happens with every trend, it's a cool for a moment, then a million people start making shitty copies of it, and then it gets destroyed.  There's only so much relatable humor you roll your eyes so hard you end up in a vegetative state.  

But teenagerposts was a pioneer, a trailblazer, an internet icon even.  Their dry, barely-witty posts shaped the humor of a generation—one can only imagine how many viral tweets and tiktoks were popularized and stolen from this blog (to be fair though, they probably stole a few themselves.)  Even if it is cringe, we must accept that the impact of teenagerposts on tumblr—and on the internet—has affected us all. 

this is when teenagerposts peaked as far as I'm concerned