Zayn had cleaned out his following list
Nick Grimshaw had contacted Scott with bad news.
Zayn Malik had unfollowed him on Instagram.
Then Scott checked his own account.
He had gone too.
So had Reese Witherspoon.
Because Zayn followed relatively few people, this felt more personal than the normal meaningless churn of celebrity follows.
Scott remembered how pleased he had been to make the select list in the first place.
Now he and Grimmy were trying to work out what they had done.
Listeners responded with their own stories of brief celebrity follows, unexplained unfollows and blocks which still bothered them years later.
Instagram could show every old comment
The team then discovered another dangerous social-media feature.
Instagram allowed users to look back through comments they had previously left.
Producer Amy’s history was mostly harmless appreciation of cats.
Chris found comments under old posts from people including Alan Dedicoat and Barbara Windsor, immediately transporting the show back several years.
The feature turned into an accidental archive of how people used Instagram when everybody was younger and considerably less careful about what they typed publicly.
Hyperpop entered the quiz
The quiz asked Scott and Chris to recognise hyperpop, a genre which immediately exposed how quickly new corners of online music culture can appear.
Scott was far more comfortable remembering old celebrity follows than confidently identifying every hyperpop reference.
The afternoon ended with a strange new form of anxiety: knowing that somewhere in an app was a searchable list of almost everything you had ever decided was worth commenting on.
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