Listen now | We’re back with another vacation minisode. We’re talking about the dead platform to end all dead platforms. The one, the only Myspace. It’s responsible for more bad haircuts than another other website possibly. It also profoundly altered the way we think about the internet and in many ways set the stage for the TikTok takeover of the 20202s. Stay tuned to see which weird old dead website we’ll resurrect next! (Cover art courtesy of the Midjourney AI.)
- In comparison to Myspace, Facebook felt like a more adult platform because of its simpler, cleaner design (versus everyone’s page looking differently terrible on Myspace)
- Classist element because only college students could get Facebook the first year
- Transition from the profile being important to only the network being important
- Myspace lacked DMs
Also this written interview about Friendster:
I’ve had this pet theory for the last year: If you look around the internet, it just feels very creaky. It feels very old. Facebook is effectively over. It’s like its parent company doesn’t care about it anymore.
When all the users leave, they take with them all of these things that they’re doing on one app and try to do them on the other app, and havoc breaks loose.
This entire idea of, “I am me online,” it starts with Friendster and now it’s completely going out of fashion. It’s very common for a Gen Z internet user to just throw away a profile and make a new one… They don’t save anything about themselves. I was interviewing someone the other day who had nine different Twitter accounts with different personas for each. They just don’t care!
See also: My Fractured Online Identity
My willingness to write under my real name has been steadily declining over the past few years. Sure, I have a blog and Twitter but I’ve been avoiding going deep on questions and ideas which mean a lot to me – topics such as religion, mental health, sexuality, therapy, and my own childhood.
When I do write about them, it’s typically under a pseudonym.
… sometimes I do regret putting my website and my Twitter and my Microblog under my real name. Without the ability for friends-only posts, there is definitely a damper on writing about some topics and what things I’m willing to put “on the record” that wasn’t on my radar twenty years ago. The current political atmosphere doesn’t help, and I’m not eager to give the fascists the rope to hang me if they manage to take over, which I haven’t ruled out as a possible future.
Multiple accounts isn’t a new thing (‘finsta’), but disregarding an online identity altogether feels different.