We are roughly three weeks into 2026 and the internet is already overflooded with calls to make 2026 the “new 2016” with everything 2016 making a resurgence in popular media.
A short intro before we proceed – A 2026 resolution I had was to learn as much as possible, not just about computer science and technology but everything under the sun. I have been fascinated with blogs since I could remember – I’ve written on Wordpress, Blogspot, Tumblr, Medium – basically if a platform allowed long-form writing, I probably tried it. Somewhere along the way, my personal website stopped being a place for reflection and started feeling like a polished CV for future opportunities. I’ve decided that this might be the perfect way to reflect who I am and predictably give myself an obligation to follow through with my resolution.
That brings me back to 2016.
Around 2015–2017, most major social platforms went through a fundamental change. Feeds slowly stopped being chronological and started becoming curated. Content was no longer shown based on when it was posted, but based on what an algorithm predicted would keep you engaged.
This was a double-edged sword in hindsight – on one hand, the human brain simply cannot process the amount of information being thrown at us at any given minute; we need a way to filter out the irrelevant and algorithmic duration serves as a helpful way to do just that. But it also transfers the autonomy of what you see from the user to the platform. You lock into ‘Instagram Reels’ – spend a significant amount of time interacting with cooking videos, the proprietary algorithm presumably learns from different parameters of your engagement with the content including view time, replays, saves, shares, etc and it derives that you are interested in cooking – good news, the algorithm continues to throw cooking videos at you. In isolation, this feels helpful. You see more of what you like. The platform feels intuitive. Unfortunately, we are increasingly navigating a world where the decisions taken on behalf of us behind this curation are getting more and more difficult to navigate.
These decisions aren’t trivial, either. Altering a person’s newsfeed affects their mood and their overall worldview.
This is where 2016 becomes interesting.
The years between 2016 and 2018 sit at a boundary — between an internet we largely visited and one that now actively follows us. For many people, it was the last era before infinite scrolls and short-form videos driven to entertain us for 30 seconds.
Back in 2016, I still did not check my Instagram aggressively or lose entire hours scrolling through Reels/Shorts/etc – it was one of the last times I experience the internet as something I visited, not something that dictated my wordlview and mood.
So the question becomes:
Are we nostalgic for 2016 because the world was objectively simpler or because we were less algorithmically immersed in it?
Algorithmic curation doesn’t just influence what we consume in the present. It also affects how we remember the past. Nostalgia performs well. You are always going to be stuck thinking back to a simpler time but what we recall is not the full experience of 2016 – the very real anxieties and responsibilities you had which feel smaller only in hindsight – but a curated highlight reel that keeps resurfacing because it works.
None of this is an argument against algorithms or social media outright. Curation is not inherently harmful, and filtering information is unavoidable at scale. But it is worth to move beyond what the algorithm tells you you should view and use the search bar more often.
And whether the thing we truly miss is 2016 itself, or the version of ourselves that existed just before our attention became the agenda on a product meeting.