I Never Liked MySpace
Everyone seems to be nostalgic about MySpace. People miss the Top 8, the profile music, and the wild custom layouts. But really? I’m not feeling it. I got involved at the time, sure, but it was never my favourite. I was already deeply rooted in something else.
I was still living in the world of instant messaging, IRC, ICQ, AIM (for some US based buddies) and eventually MSN Messenger. That was my internet. Real time chats, away messages, custom nicks, and late night conversations that felt like they meant something, lol. It was fast, raw, and personal. I’ve written before about my love for instant messaging, it just hit differently.
Then MySpace came along and shifted everything. Suddenly it wasn’t about who you were talking to, it was about how you looked online. People started performing. Profiles got cluttered with autoplaying music, glitter graphics, and copy-pasted layout tweaks. It became less of a conversation and more of a showcase. This was also a time when more people started to come online for the first time too.
Everyone loves to wax poetic about the Top 8 like it was this groundbreaking social mechanic. But we already had that on our personal sites, with our friends’ 88x31 buttons lined up in the sidebar. The difference was those buttons usually came from online friends, people from IRC or other early web communities. The Top 8 was different. That was personal. It usually mapped to your schoolmates and real life social groups, which made the drama hit harder when someone dropped you. It was fun, but also a new kind of public scoreboard. I always always a fan of being anonymous online anyway.
To me, MySpace marked the start of a shift, away from close knit interaction and toward profile curating and social broadcasting. The beginning of the end. It paved the way for follower counts, influencer culture, and everything that makes the web feel a little less human today.
That said, I’ll give MySpace this: it introduced a whole generation to HTML and CSS. For a lot of people, that was their first experience modifying code, breaking things, fixing them, learning by doing. That part was cool. A tiny spark of the personal web still lived in all that chaos.
But the rest? You can keep it. I’ll be over here waiting for someone to message me on XMPP (yes, I still use it, here’s how), or idle quietly in IRC.
Awww who am I kidding — I miss IRC, but it’s all Discord these days, isn’t it? Fuck.
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