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So before I deleted my MySpace account, I actually took screenshots of my profile and everything in it [because I'm weird like that]. So now that the spectre of MySpace has been raised via SpaceHey, I decided to take a look at the old screenshots. It looks like I deleted my account around 10-11 years ago...hard to believe it's been that long!
Anyway, I looked at my friends list and I realized that I had forgotten just how many people/groups/organizations had accounts. My local public library's "Teen Space" had one. In fact, the American Library Association had one! There was even an account for my high school graduating class, created for the purpose of planning the eventual 10-year reunion. When everyone went to Facebook, the organizers had to go through the effort again of locating everyone in my class and creating a new group page.
Of course, many bands and artists had accounts. Some where big names like The Smashing Pumpkins and The Shins. Others were artists that were not well known, but through MySpace, I was able to discover them. What struck me is that in my friend's list, every account had equal billing--or rather, all accounts were presented equally, whether it was a nationally-known band or just an individual (except for our Top 7 friends, which *we* got to choose...NOT an algorithm!).
It's easy to forget how big MySpace was. Yet it quickly disappeared from the collective memory once Facebook took over. We derided MySpace for being trashy and cluttered with cheesy glitter GIFs and were drawn to Facebook's clean interface. We didn't know what we were getting ourselves into. We didn't know how good we had it with MySpace.
So here we are again, trying to recreate that magic. It would be nice to see it succeed, even if modestly.
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clive
That's a terrific description of what made MySpace such a weirdly democratic place: The flatness of it -- not "flat" as in "bad", but flat as in "without any imposed hierarchy".
The fact that bands just sort of mingled amongst one's regular friends is a really lovely observation.
It'll be interesting to see if this place develops any sort of mechanisms for sorting or ranking or quantifying things. I sort of hope it doesn't, because while the lack of hierarchy requires more effort on our part -- as with MySpace, we have to go around manually checking pages to see if anyone's posted anything new. But it avoids the grim logic and hot-take preferences that tend to colonize the worldview of an algorithm.
Jeff Wright
Not being weird at all. Quite sensible, it’s good to reminisce and see what was happening all those years ago.