| ▲ | Why MySpace fans want it back as relaunch hinted(bbc.com) |
| 33 points by 1659447091 9 hours ago | 35 comments |
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| ▲ | emursebrian 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | whstl 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | marginalia_nu 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | nelsonic 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I was curious too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies | | |
| ▲ | delis-thumbs-7e 20 minutes ago | parent [-] | | Content warning: One will be extremely sad and dissapointed at humanity. | | |
| ▲ | estearum 11 minutes ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | TFNA 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | beezlewax 34 minutes ago | parent [-] | | That whole emo scene seemed to eminate from MySpace. It was great for budding musicians of all types though |
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| ▲ | FeteCommuniste an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | > clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today Damn that analogy hits hard. |
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| ▲ | kilroy123 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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/ |
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| ▲ | TazeTSchnitzel 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | dwh452 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | TFNA 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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.) | |
| ▲ | Farow 23 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | Do you think the average person can properly handle security issues and spam? Maybe a static site is fine. |
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| ▲ | iansmith_hn 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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... |
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| ▲ | SpaceL10n 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | whstl 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | marginalia_nu 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | drooopy 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | iinnPP 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's what I miss. Some level of personality is desperately missing from modern alternatives. | |
| ▲ | classified 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | walthamstow an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | coolgoose 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | jfengel an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| My friend Tom hasn't gotten in touch for a while. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| While Hi5 and MySpace were interesting times, I don't care about the possibility of them coming back. |
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| ▲ | hn_submit 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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 shit hole 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 simply avoiding social networks altogether. |
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| ▲ | scrubmunch 34 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| they should bring back myspace as a millenial containment zone |
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| ▲ | BoingBoomTschak 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| It already exists: https://spacehey.com/ PS: not a user, so caveat emptor |
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| ▲ | pram 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Sure to be as successful as the Digg resurrection lol |
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| ▲ | doublerabbit 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | thisislife2 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It's not for you or me - it's for the AI companies so that they can have "human" content (good luck with that). | |
| ▲ | fragmede 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | ulfw 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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 |
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| ▲ | unxmaal an hour ago | parent [-] | | Facebook (and the other “social media” platforms) are now Memetic Distribution Systems. |
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