> "You could be authentic on MySpace," she says. "Upload raw images, no filters. You could have snot coming out your nose and nobody would judge."
Did that have to do with the website or with the culture of the entire internet? Or maybe the entire world?
I heard a prediction that ultra low production value (e.g. live streaming in a bathrobe) will become a great community building strategy over the next year or two, because nobody would use AI to make themselves look disheveled, therefore they must be a real person, therefore I can trust them.
---
On a related note I'm now seeing everyone's faces being smooth out by weird AI filters. I thought it was YouTube doing it but it seems to be either the person's camera or video editing software. (For example stock footage in the same video often does not have the same plastic skin effect.)
Does anyone know where that comes from? I find it very jarring and I'm not sure if the content creators are even aware that it's being done to their content. I remember an old phone of mine would do it automatically and I had to turn it off.
I roasted MySpace hard back in the day, but now I kind of miss it. I was all too happy to move over to Facebook and leave MySpace behind.
For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.
At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.
I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.
Can you tell me more about that? The cool interactive content. I'd love to hear more details about your experience and what you miss.
For me the main thing I miss is Flash. I know there's Ruffle as Flashplayer replacement but the culture around Flash (and most of the authoring tools) has basically died.
(I talked to a bunch of Flash animators I knew back in the day and every single one was surprised to hear that Flash is still available, they just changed the name. Big fail on Adobe's part...)
As for the cute 90s and 2000s web designs, have you seen NeoCities? That spirit is alive and well there :)
The other thing I miss is that everyone would put their email in their form signature and you could just add everyone on MSN. People were super chill in those days, I made a lot of friends that way.
Nowadays the only unsolicited messages I get are from people trying to sell me something.
Strangely, I kinda see it being the first thing where "everyone must get into".
Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.
But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.
After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.
Funnily enough, my experience is a combination of both yours and the GP’s. MSN Messenger vs AIM was what I perceived as the first big megacorp battle on the internet with ads everywhere and it was the first set of platforms people just had to be on. That’s when the internet went from IRC/BBS/small forum communication for nerds to my non-technical school friends using it.
The cool kids (nerds) later just used Pidgin or whatever, but I remember that era as being the first intense competition over the internet. Probably says more about my age than anything else.
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days.
Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
MySpace was notorious for people with social problems who weren't getting out much. Bedroom musicians were able to share tunes and get buzz that they wouldn't have been able to achieve before, since they couldn't manage the in-real-life socialization needed for self-promotion.
Man yeah... that's some heartbreaking stuff. I was (oddly) relieved to see that these horrible experiments actually did lead to improvements in how humans raised their young.
> Physical contact with infants was considered harmful to their development, and this view led to sterile, contact-less nurseries across the country.
A view which these experiments apparently contested, and now is probably widely regarded as abhorrent.
> Critics of Harlow's research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.
I don’t know how one (especially anyone who has raised a child) could think contact is less important in humans or that this doesn’t generalize.
What people want back is the crazy innovation of getting every one of your friends' updates unless you have intentionally muted them, in chronological order. It was also nice to decorate your page. Made it yours.
My first paid software gig was making a famous person's MySpace page. I got my first software job because of this. So I have a real soft spot for MySpace.
Be careful with this site, the footer on each page claims "no tracking" but it's very chatty to it's "engagement" backend with some odd looking numbers included.
POST https://allthedamn.tools/api/pa/event
{"n":"pageview","v":36,"u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","d":"allthedamn.tools","r":"https://news.ycombinator.com/"}
{"n":"engagement","sd":93,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/","e":32684,"v":36}
{"n":"engagement","sd":100,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","e":2983,"v":36}
Every page is already a GET call so if they want metrics on which tools are being used they can use the server access logs but they're choosing to use this extra layer of engagement tracking for some reason.
The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.
POST https://allthedamn.tools/cdn-cgi/rum?
{"resources":[],"referrer":"https://allthedamn.tools/gif-maker/","eventType":1,"firstPaint":[REDACTED],"firstContentfulPaint":[REDACTED],"startTime":[REDACTED],"versions":{"fl":"2024.11.0","js":"2026.6.0","timings":1},"pageloadId":"[REDACTED]","location":"https://allthedamn.tools/word-counter/","nt":"navigate","timingsV2":{"nextHopProtocol":"h3","transferSize":16584,"decodedBodySize":98788},"dt":"","siteToken":"[REDACTED]","st":2}
The privacy policy claims these are "privacy-friendly analytics"
The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.
GET https://allthedamn.tools/favicon.svg
304 Not Modified
cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate
They can try to bring back something resembling the MySpace experience, but they can't bring back the millions of songs they deleted in 2018 with no backup. That was a great crime against modern music history.
The fact MySpace "accidentally" deleted all their pictures a few years ago is such a loss to internet history. Try looking for images for any music artist that was around during peak MySpace but not now.
Pages with personality like that are not just examples of how bad UX can be, they are examples of how UX can be used as an artistic form of self-expression.
Even commercial design was interesting and eye-catching back then.
Print designers were adapting to the web and there was a tremendous amount of technique, experience and hard work in that first batch.
Then the dictatorship of the sameness started, and we somehow ended in a world where everything kinda looks the same but is slightly different in slightly broken ways. Creativity be damned, but also other things like performance, accessibility and user-centricity are now secondary to following fashions.
True, but it was all quite harmless. Today's perfectly designed web sites are made by folks who know exactly how to make you addicted to the algorithmic feed and whatnot.
Ah, MySpace, I think I made thousands of custom MySpace themes, hacking their complete lack of html escaping to change the layout. I wonder if they'd stil allow that same level of jankiness
I'm not sure that that's even worth considering, seeing as Facebook just lets scammers pay to list ads that are disguised (by Facebook) as actual posts.
Isn't the internet a social network? Get a website. put vacation photos up. no ads. use AI to add chat, messaging, blogging, discussion forums, and a web ring. why do things like facebook/myspace exist at all?
Talk to younger people (and not only) today about the way they use the internet. Many of them no longer visit third-party websites at all. They only use walled gardens through dedicated phone apps.
Sure, you can get a website and put whatever you want there. But it simply won't get any meaningful amount of visitors. (By contrast, early-millennium web content was popular enough that real-life subcultures could bond over following the same blogs and other sites.)
I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.
How would this be any better than Facebook? I mean, in the end all social networks want to be Facebook, right? As soon as there's talk of an IPO or private equity becoming involved you know it's going down the same shithole that Facebook has fallen into.
I've come to the conclusion that enshitification is simply part of Big Capitalism so the only right thing to do is use open protocols like IRC/email or avoiding social networks altogether.
Today we have no social networks. Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into.. frankly I don't even know what it is. But it's not about getting updates from your friends.
instagram took that place but he fucked that one up too by mutating it into a cheap tiktok clone instead.
Social networks are now just influencer/media produced slob to be consumed by the masses. A Youtube with shorter clips.
It's not an actual social network where you could find out what your friends are up to
> "You could be authentic on MySpace," she says. "Upload raw images, no filters. You could have snot coming out your nose and nobody would judge."
Did that have to do with the website or with the culture of the entire internet? Or maybe the entire world?
I heard a prediction that ultra low production value (e.g. live streaming in a bathrobe) will become a great community building strategy over the next year or two, because nobody would use AI to make themselves look disheveled, therefore they must be a real person, therefore I can trust them.
---
On a related note I'm now seeing everyone's faces being smooth out by weird AI filters. I thought it was YouTube doing it but it seems to be either the person's camera or video editing software. (For example stock footage in the same video often does not have the same plastic skin effect.)
Does anyone know where that comes from? I find it very jarring and I'm not sure if the content creators are even aware that it's being done to their content. I remember an old phone of mine would do it automatically and I had to turn it off.
I roasted MySpace hard back in the day, but now I kind of miss it. I was all too happy to move over to Facebook and leave MySpace behind.
For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.
At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.
I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.
Can you tell me more about that? The cool interactive content. I'd love to hear more details about your experience and what you miss.
For me the main thing I miss is Flash. I know there's Ruffle as Flashplayer replacement but the culture around Flash (and most of the authoring tools) has basically died.
(I talked to a bunch of Flash animators I knew back in the day and every single one was surprised to hear that Flash is still available, they just changed the name. Big fail on Adobe's part...)
As for the cute 90s and 2000s web designs, have you seen NeoCities? That spirit is alive and well there :)
The other thing I miss is that everyone would put their email in their form signature and you could just add everyone on MSN. People were super chill in those days, I made a lot of friends that way.
Nowadays the only unsolicited messages I get are from people trying to sell me something.
Strangely, I kinda see it being the first thing where "everyone must get into".
Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.
But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.
After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.
Funnily enough, my experience is a combination of both yours and the GP’s. MSN Messenger vs AIM was what I perceived as the first big megacorp battle on the internet with ads everywhere and it was the first set of platforms people just had to be on. That’s when the internet went from IRC/BBS/small forum communication for nerds to my non-technical school friends using it.
The cool kids (nerds) later just used Pidgin or whatever, but I remember that era as being the first intense competition over the internet. Probably says more about my age than anything else.
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days.
Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
MySpace was notorious for people with social problems who weren't getting out much. Bedroom musicians were able to share tunes and get buzz that they wouldn't have been able to achieve before, since they couldn't manage the in-real-life socialization needed for self-promotion.
That whole emo scene seemed to eminate from MySpace.
It was great for budding musicians of all types though
I was curious too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies
Content warning: One will be extremely sad and dissapointed at humanity.
Man yeah... that's some heartbreaking stuff. I was (oddly) relieved to see that these horrible experiments actually did lead to improvements in how humans raised their young.
> Physical contact with infants was considered harmful to their development, and this view led to sterile, contact-less nurseries across the country.
A view which these experiments apparently contested, and now is probably widely regarded as abhorrent.
Poor monkeys though.
I was amazed reading this:
> Critics of Harlow's research have observed that clinging is a matter of survival in young rhesus monkeys, but not in humans, and have suggested that his conclusions, when applied to humans, overestimate the importance of contact comfort and underestimate the importance of nursing.
I don’t know how one (especially anyone who has raised a child) could think contact is less important in humans or that this doesn’t generalize.
> clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today
Damn that analogy hits hard.
What people want back is the crazy innovation of getting every one of your friends' updates unless you have intentionally muted them, in chronological order. It was also nice to decorate your page. Made it yours.
My first paid software gig was making a famous person's MySpace page. I got my first software job because of this. So I have a real soft spot for MySpace.
I made a fun thing this week for nostalgia:
https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/
Be careful with this site, the footer on each page claims "no tracking" but it's very chatty to it's "engagement" backend with some odd looking numbers included.
Every page is already a GET call so if they want metrics on which tools are being used they can use the server access logs but they're choosing to use this extra layer of engagement tracking for some reason.The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.
The privacy policy claims these are "privacy-friendly analytics"The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.
They can try to bring back something resembling the MySpace experience, but they can't bring back the millions of songs they deleted in 2018 with no backup. That was a great crime against modern music history.
And the images too! I've been trying to fill in images for artists big in that time period and it's just sad.
The fact MySpace "accidentally" deleted all their pictures a few years ago is such a loss to internet history. Try looking for images for any music artist that was around during peak MySpace but not now.
I don't want the website back particularly but I would quite like some of the photos taken of me between 2004 and 2006 which no longer exist anywhere
Talk about rose-colored glasses and "the good ol' days". All I can remember are the animated gifs flash and spinning around on people's pages...
Pages with personality like that are not just examples of how bad UX can be, they are examples of how UX can be used as an artistic form of self-expression.
Even commercial design was interesting and eye-catching back then.
Print designers were adapting to the web and there was a tremendous amount of technique, experience and hard work in that first batch.
Then the dictatorship of the sameness started, and we somehow ended in a world where everything kinda looks the same but is slightly different in slightly broken ways. Creativity be damned, but also other things like performance, accessibility and user-centricity are now secondary to following fashions.
You still have that sort of expression on neocities. It's a genuine treat to see what people are building over there.
https://neocities.org/browse
I miss that quite a lot. For the past 20 years the Web has been a sterile wasteland full of minimalist white and grays and 0 personality.
That's what I miss. Some level of personality is desperately missing from modern alternatives.
True, but it was all quite harmless. Today's perfectly designed web sites are made by folks who know exactly how to make you addicted to the algorithmic feed and whatnot.
Ah, MySpace, I think I made thousands of custom MySpace themes, hacking their complete lack of html escaping to change the layout. I wonder if they'd stil allow that same level of jankiness
I can see large amounts of exploits and scams being a thing these days.
I'm not sure that that's even worth considering, seeing as Facebook just lets scammers pay to list ads that are disguised (by Facebook) as actual posts.
Isn't the internet a social network? Get a website. put vacation photos up. no ads. use AI to add chat, messaging, blogging, discussion forums, and a web ring. why do things like facebook/myspace exist at all?
Talk to younger people (and not only) today about the way they use the internet. Many of them no longer visit third-party websites at all. They only use walled gardens through dedicated phone apps.
Sure, you can get a website and put whatever you want there. But it simply won't get any meaningful amount of visitors. (By contrast, early-millennium web content was popular enough that real-life subcultures could bond over following the same blogs and other sites.)
Do you think the average person can properly handle security issues and spam? Maybe a static site is fine.
Step 1: Get a website.
it is. the problem is that it doesn't have a marketing budget and big tech that has the biggest ones use it to attack the open web.
[dead]
My friend Tom hasn't gotten in touch for a while.
> Why MySpace fans want it back
Because they want their 2007 back. But there is a catch.
While Hi5 and MySpace were interesting times, I don't care about the possibility of them coming back.
It already exists: https://spacehey.com/
PS: not a user, so caveat emptor
it was a show HN once:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740
I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.
How would this be any better than Facebook? I mean, in the end all social networks want to be Facebook, right? As soon as there's talk of an IPO or private equity becoming involved you know it's going down the same shithole that Facebook has fallen into.
I've come to the conclusion that enshitification is simply part of Big Capitalism so the only right thing to do is use open protocols like IRC/email or avoiding social networks altogether.
Sure to be as successful as the Digg resurrection lol
myspace was a social network.
Today we have no social networks. Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into.. frankly I don't even know what it is. But it's not about getting updates from your friends. instagram took that place but he fucked that one up too by mutating it into a cheap tiktok clone instead.
Social networks are now just influencer/media produced slob to be consumed by the masses. A Youtube with shorter clips.
It's not an actual social network where you could find out what your friends are up to
Facebook (and the other “social media” platforms) are now Memetic Distribution Systems.
[dead]
As a MySpace fan, I don't want it back at all. Can we stop this rehashing of memories and come up with something new?
Great for its time, but with the way the internet is, it will just turn in to another toxic echo chamber.
Next up: Toy Story 7, Andy finds a Sinclair ZX Spectrum in the attic and its missing its 16kb expansion module called Chippy.
Sure. Get mega rich and buy it so you can do whatever you want with it, including shutting it down. Hell, make a GoFundMe for it, see what happens.
It's not for you or me - it's for the AI companies so that they can have "human" content (good luck with that).
they should bring back myspace as a millenial containment zone