Newgrounds was creative and transgressive; YouTube was goofy and unrehearsed; early Facebook was a fun way to connect with people you knew and forge bonds of common interest with people you didn’t.

I think early Facebook was the writing on the wall for the demise of fun on the internet. It was like a prison, or private school forcing everyone into a uniform layout. Especially compared to the wonderfully chaotic mess that was Myspace, livejournal, geocities, and hundreds of others.

I remember the day I gave in and started using facebook, hundreds of people I knew in real life learned my real name for the first time. I feel like a part of me died then, but that could have also just been growing up.

Yeah I had a similar experience, even as a teen I resisted the move from myspace to facebook because it felt so bland and lifeless. Hard to overstate the psychological benefit of having a customizable page that really feels like your own space, especially at that age.