33 Internet Moments So Bizarre, Screenshots Were Basically Mandatory

Screenshots and screen grabs seem like common-sense functions. It’s hard to imagine a time when they weren’t widely accessible.

And yet, the iPhone was the very first mobile phone to integrate this function, back in 2007. It took Android 4 years to follow suit, Vice reports.

Originally, screenshots were very simple and involved using a camera to take a photo of a screen. They were popular not just in the programming and science world, but were later also a way for video gamers to share their scores and achievements.

Eventually, the ‘print screen’ command appeared on computers in the 1990s, doing away with the need for a physical camera.

The internet and social media are essential parts of modern life. And their use is spreading.

Statista stresses that social media “consistently expands, advances and grows around the world.”

For instance, in 2024, social media reached a whopping 62% in terms of global reach, with most users in Northern and Western Europe, followed by Eastern Asia and Southern Europe.

By 2028, the world is expected to be home to a jaw-dropping 6.05 billion social media users.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, reported a whopping $133 billion in annual revenue, almost double that in 2018. In early 2024, Facebook reported more than 3 billion monthly active users.

Across various platforms, short-form videos have allowed some influencers and content creators to get billions of views. And yet, the competition is fierce. The majority of creators are nowhere near as successful as a super-minority of influencers.

For example, Statista reports that as of 2022, more than two-thirds of TikTok creators had between 1k and 10k followers, and fewer than 1% had over 1 million followers.

According to Statista, online video and entertainment are hugely popular among all generations. However, young people consume digital content much more widely than older generations.

Based on data from 2023, the average person worldwide spent more than 28 hours per month engaging with the YouTube mobile app. In South Korea, this number stood at 44.5 hours per month.

Music videos are an incredibly popular niche. They were the type of content that viewers spent the most time on back in 2023. Other popular video content includes news, sports, and video game live streams.

By the end of that year, online videos reached a whopping 92% of the global digital population.

The ‘Screenshots’ online group has been amusing and confusing netizens for close to two decades. It was originally created in April 2008, and its members continue sharing the most intriguing moments they’ve seen online to this day.

According to the moderators who run the group, they define screenshots as screen grabs. “This means images of screens, pictures of screens taken with a different device, images that have been partially or fully generated by a computer, or pictures of printed out screenshots.”

‘Screenshots’ is a community that greatly values originality when it comes to content. The mods emphasize that you can and should only ever post screenshots that you have personally taken. Meanwhile, you can’t repost content from other users or sources without properly attributing it.

Before you post a cool screenshot, add a clear and relevant title that explains what everyone’s looking at and why it’s interesting. You have to put in a bit more effort than writing “funny” or “look.”

In the meantime, make sure that in your massive enthusiasm to share interesting internet content, you don’t actually share anyone’s private information. Things like names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, workplaces, and schools should not be visible in the screen grabs. The only exceptions are public figures whose info is widely available.

The mods add that you should avoid sharing unedited screenshots of basic desktop backgrounds, as well as duplicate posts of the same or similar content. In short, scroll a bit, do a tiny bit of research, and try to add value, instead of copying others.

You are actually allowed to share photos that you’ve taken of screens, so long as the image is reasonably clear.

In other words, you can go all old-school here and rewind the clock to where screenshots started.

What’s your take, Pandas? Which of these internet moments do you think definitely deserved to be preserved, and which ones would you rather everyone forgot?

How often would you say that you use the screenshot function on your computer or phone every day? What’s the oddest or most hilarious thing you took a screenshot of today? Share your insights, opinions, and images in the comments at the very bottom of our list.

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