Battle of the best friends

On her podcast, Lily Allen talked about ranking her mates based on priority. All jokes aside, is it a good idea or would it add efficiency where it doesn’t belong, asks Katie Rosseinsky

- Katie Rosseinsky

Cast your millennial minds back to the year 2006. Social media is in its infancy, and you might even still be using a dial-up modem to access it on your PC. Mercifully, only a few people outside of Silicon Valley have heard of Mark Zuckerberg - but you and all your teenage peers know exactly what MySpace founder Tom Anderson looks like. That's because, as soon as you sign up to his website, a photo of Anderson posing in front of a whiteboard covered in scribbles appears in your “Top Eight” friends list by default.

If you came of age some time in the mid-Noughties, then the words “Top Eight” probably alternately fill you with warm nostalgia and chilly horror. Each profile on the rudimentary social media platform’s website featured a showcase of that user’s eight best friends, in a list ranked by how much they liked them.

And if you were really good at rudimentary HTML, like one of my inner circle? You could code your page in such a way that no one else could see your ranking, allowing you to be even more honest (read: brutal) about your roster. We felt revolutionary, like trailblazing women in STEM, but we were actually just devious and a bit petty.

It was performative popularity at its most blatant; it was also addictive, anxiety-inducing (why has Becky P bumped me down two places since last week?) and probably laid waste to thousands of friendships along the way. I think I’m still carrying residual guilt from the time I demoted a once-close pal because I was spending more time with an older, cooler crowd, prompting us to drift apart entirely (was I ever so cruel?)