There was a time — a simpler, grainier, Sol-de-Janeiro-filtered time, when Instagram was ugly. And it was beautiful.

Before the clean grids, the perfectly lit pictures and the “effortless” photo dumps that definitely took 45 minutes to curate, there was chaos. Photos were crooked. Filters were orange. Captions were song lyrics no one understood. I posted a blurry picture of my Converse on a sidewalk and got 11 likes, and I felt like a celebrity.

Now, it feels like everyone’s competing to be the most casual. Every post is a delicate balancing act of pretending not to care while clearly caring a lot. Your friends’ photo dumps look like Vogue spreads: a Polaroid of a half-eaten croissant, a random shot of their knee and one artfully blurry photo of a sunset.

We used to post with reckless abandon. There was no “soft launch.” There was just launching, hard.

The wild west of filters and bad decisions

Back in 2012, filters were personality traits. Valencia made you deep. X-Pro II meant you were mysterious. Kelvin was for people who didn’t understand subtlety. Every picture looked like it was taken through a jar of peanut butter, and we loved it.

Our captions were chaotic masterpieces. “Felt cute, might delete” hadn’t been invented yet, so we just said whatever came to mind: “Summer <3,” “ily,” “#nofilter (with filter).” We didn’t think about engagement rates or algorithms, we just wanted our crush to like our photo of a frappuccino.

Now, it’s a production. You need to post at the right time, have a “cohesive aesthetic” and find the perfect balance of irony and sincerity. I open Instagram and it feels like a museum carefully curated by influencers.

When likes actually meant something

Remember when getting double-digit likes was a big deal? You’d refresh every five minutes, watch the number creep up and text your friend like, “I’m at 100!!!!” It was pure, unfiltered serotonin.

Now the numbers don’t even matter, or at least, we pretend they don’t. Instagram literally gave us the option to hide likes, as if that would cure the deep, soul-level need for external validation. Spoiler: it didn’t. We’re still refreshing, just more discreetly.

The worst part? No one even uses the “like” button anymore. It’s all about story views. There’s nothing quite as humbling as realizing 200 people tapped through your story but only three interacted with it, one of them being your mom.

The death of the random post

Once upon a time, you could post a low-quality photo of your lunch without shame. A stack of pancakes? Post it. Your dog asleep in weird lighting? Post it. You in a mirror with the flash on and an outfit from Wet Seal? Absolutely post it.

Now, if your photo doesn’t look like it was taken with a film camera and edited by Sofia Coppola, it’s not making the cut. Instagram used to be for sharing your life. Now it’s for building a brand. And the brand is “effortlessly hot person who just happens to be in Paris.”

Even “photo dumps,” the supposed rebellion against curated content, are just another form of curation. You can’t fool me. No one accidentally creates a perfect sequence of selfies, sunsets and concert wristbands. That’s not chaos. That’s art direction.

We were all influencers once

In the early days, we were all influencers: just of our tiny, middle-school social circles. You didn’t need 10K followers or PR packages — you just needed one kid from eighth-grade homeroom to comment “cute!! <3.”

We weren’t performing for strangers. We were performing for people who had seen us at our worst, in braces and Hollister hoodies. Validation was simple, personal and slightly embarrassing. And that was the point.

Now, every post feels like a job application to be perceived as cool, calm and chronically online. I miss when we didn’t care how we were perceived because everyone already knew exactly who we were.

Maybe ugly was better

The old Instagram was messy and weird and honest. It was inside jokes and bad angles and overexposed sunsets. It was the digital equivalent of passing notes in class, small, dumb and full of heart.

We didn’t post to be aspirational — we posted to be seen. Not by thousands of strangers, but by 12 people we went to middle school with, and that was enough.

Maybe Instagram doesn’t need to go back to being ugly. Maybe we just need to stop pretending it ever looked better polished.