Internet slang didn't start with texting, and it didn't start with social media. It started with people typing quickly to other people, on systems that made typing quickly worthwhile — and it has kept evolving, in fairly distinct waves, ever since.
1980s: The bulletin board roots
Long before the web existed, dial-up bulletin board systems and early networks like Usenet were already developing their own shorthand, mostly to save time and keystrokes. "LOL" has a documented appearance in the BBS-focused newsletter FidoNews as early as 1989, and abbreviations like "BRB" (be right back) were already circulating in print references to computer culture around the same period. The sideways emoticon :-) dates to 1982, proposed by Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman as a way to flag jokes in plain text.
1990s: Chatrooms and instant messaging
As AOL chat rooms and instant messaging brought real-time typed conversation to a mass audience, the vocabulary spread and multiplied fast. LOL was firmly established by the early-to-mid 1990s, joined by variants signaling escalating amusement — LMAO ("laughing my ass off") and ROFL ("rolling on the floor laughing") among them — along with practical shorthand like BTW ("by the way") and TTYL ("talk to you later"), all built for the same underlying purpose: saying more with less typing, in a conversation happening in real time.
Late 1990s–2000s: Gaming and message boards
Online multiplayer gaming and message board culture contributed a somewhat rougher, more insular set of terms — "noob" for an inexperienced user, "pwned" as a deliberately misspelled boast over defeating someone, and "leetspeak," a stylized text substitution using numbers and symbols in place of letters (as in "1337" for "leet," meaning elite). This era's slang tended to signal insider status within specific gaming and forum communities more than it aimed for wide, casual use.
2000s–early 2010s: Social platforms and texting
As texting and platforms like MySpace and early Twitter became dominant, slang shifted toward brevity suited to character limits and small phone keyboards: "brb," "omg," "idk," alongside newer coinages like "epic fail," used to mock a spectacularly unsuccessful attempt at something, and the broader rise of "meme" as a term for a rapidly spreading cultural in-joke, usually image-based.
2010s: Hashtags and reaction culture
The rise of Twitter and Instagram popularized the hashtag as a way to tag and search content, and slang increasingly borrowed from meme culture and reaction images — phrases like "on fleek," "lit," and "savage" spread and burned out within the space of a year or two, part of a much faster churn cycle than earlier internet slang, driven by how quickly content itself could now spread.
2020s: Irony and tone-shifting
More recently, some of the oldest internet slang has quietly changed meaning. "LOL," once a literal signal of laughter, is now frequently used ironically, dismissively, or just as a soft tone-softener with no actual laughter implied. Emoji have increasingly taken over roles that acronyms used to play, adding tone and emotional context to short text — a direct descendant of exactly what :-) was invented to do back in 1982, just with a much bigger vocabulary.
What's consistent across every decade is the underlying motive: typed conversation moves fast, and slang is what happens when people keep inventing shortcuts for feelings that plain words are too slow to convey.
Why it keeps turning over so fast
Internet slang has always spread and mutated faster than spoken slang, mostly because the same platforms that popularize a term also make it trivially easy to track, screenshot, and eventually mock it, which tends to shorten its useful lifespan. A phrase that spreads through a single viral post can feel completely played out within months, where equivalent shifts in spoken language historically took years or decades to fully turn over. That accelerated cycle is arguably the real throughline connecting a 1989 FidoNews post to a 2020s meme format: not any particular word, but the sheer speed at which a typing-based community can agree on new shorthand, wear it out, and move on to the next one.