"Why Spacehey Won't Replace Facebook": A Rebuttal

Now that Spacehey has emerged to bring back an oldie but a goodie, we’re all in a hazy, pink cloud of bliss right now, recapturing the days when social media was so much more social and so much less media. Millennials are recapturing the glory days, as if savoring a re-release of Oreo O’s cereal. And Gen Z-ers are trying to see what all the fuss was about, anyways. (Which is a bit like a Victorian goth trying to recapture the feeling of living in the Victorian era in England. It’s just not possible because times have certainly changed. Pretending to live in the Victorian era just isn’t the same without the looming threat of the cholera threatening your life.)

2011 was a frustrating year for loyal MySpace users. It was at that time that Justin Timberlake bought MySpace from poppa Tom and absolutely destroyed it. Not only did the new leadership completely nix the MySpace 1.0 format for those who wanted to keep it. They just completely transformed MySpace into Facbeook. MySpace then added the stupid “like” system and it made the home page look like a cobbled mess to accommodate the “posting” feature, which both came directly from Facebook. (My theory is that Justin Timberlake desperately wanted to be Zucc’s little butt buddy. So, he took out his dying competitor. I mean, that’s why he took an acting role in The Social Network, right? I’m kidding. I have no idea what his motive really was. But MySpace was ruined under his aegis.)

The year leading up to Great MySpace Exodus of ’11 was frustrating. New formats were being pushed onto the users. (MySpace 2.0 and MySpace 3.0…blegh) MySpace 1.0 acolytes had to hold onto their old accounts because we couldn’t make new MySpace 1.0 accounts. Our stupider and more vapid friends were abandoning MySpace to go to Facebook. Why? I have no idea. Because they no longer had to use their creativity to decorate their profiles? Because instead of thinking about what they were going to fill their Blurb sections with, giving friends a real sense of who they were, they could just “like” a page? Because the “like” feature was like a Big Mac: easy and immensely gratifying, but overall empty of substance, needing to be satiated again an hour later? Because Facebook stripped them of the right to identify themselves by the names and nicknames they chose, instead demanding that they display their first and last names for all to see, so they no longer had to put thought into their usernames?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that MySpace was full of scholars and gentlemen. There were annoying scene-mo kids who had thousands of friends, who posted the same selfie 50 times in a row (just at slightly different angles) everyday and who constantly spammed you with “PC4PC?” comments. There were poiverts, I tell ya. And back then, nobody ever really reported hate speech or blocked people for it. We just kinda…let it go. It wasn’t as if MySpace could be bothered to do anything about it, anyways. (Sooo…basically how Facebook is right now. Except, they like to pretend that they’re doing something about bullying and hate speech and they like to send people to Facebook jail for calling a raging misogynist a “little bitch”. Go figure.)

In a way, I understand why MySpace was phased out in favor of Facebook. 1.) MySpace just required too much effort. As I said a couple of paragraphs back, Facebook eliminated the work entirely from the highly individualistic features so that people could just bask in the virtual validation without really doing anything to earn it. And 2.) Facebook just absolutely bombarded the user with all kinds of diversions: videos, memes, inspirational quotes, games and more, all completely accessible on your dashboard.

But, humans never learn that at some point, they gotta stop wanting wanting wanting so much. At some point, you gotta stop trying to colonize Mars with so much fervor before our Earth problem has been dealt with. At some point, you gotta stop trying to breed a human and a chimp together to create a “humanzee”. At some point, you have to be told that tying a living dog to a corner and allowing it to starve in an art museum isn’t fucking art, it’s fucking cruelty. Eventually, it all became too much for the dwindling attention span of the average human and Twitter gained traction as a microblogging platform. Eventually, eventually, even 140 characters became too much effort to read and the mostly visual platform of Instagram popped up.

Sure, the experts who implement the changes that we NEVER asked for on social media possibly sensed the reduction in activity whenever a certain feature required too much effort. And maybe that’s why Twitter and Instagram remain equals with Facebook, rather than eclipsing it. If any social media site can cater to the average human’s stupidity, it thrives. If it can’t, then, if it stays loyal to its signature features, it will thrive with a smaller niche of users. But I don’t think even the savviest and most perceptive experts really sensed just how toxic social media would eventually become.

Eventually, Facebook started hiding the most pertinent aspects of a user’s personality on their profiles. Nowadays, you have to dig into a person’s actual profile to find out what movies, music and activities they like and to read a quick blurb on how they choose to define themselves. (With Facebook’s most recent change, I still struggle to find a person’s “About Me” section.) It brought in reactions, which were probably a well-meaning feature to diversify a person’s thoughts, other than just “liking” something. But eventually, people started weaponizing that feature against each other. They started laugh-reacting to those they disagreed with and love-reacting to rebuttals against those they disagreed with. (Hey, I’m guilty. I’m just a filthy human like everyone else.) And most importantly, Facebook made it all too easy for complete strangers to interact with each other via videos, posts from public pages and articles. (Don’t get me wrong, MySpace also had videos you could check out and public groups or forums that you could post in. You could also interact with strangers in the comment section of a celebrity page’s bulletins or blogs. But 1.) There wasn’t really a notification feature for that in the beginning. You usually had to go out of your way to check the replies to your comment outside of your own profile. And 2.) People just minded their own fucking business most of the time, back then.)

Now, I’m not saying that easy accessibility and diverse features are entirely culpable for social media becoming the toxic, mutant cesspool of nutbaggery and sheer cruelty that seems like it crawled out of the pits of hell that it is today. And I’m certainly no expert in business trends, human psychology or sociology. (But I do live in 2021, the era in which a non-expert should be given the same weight as an expert OR ELSE.) But, I believe that easy accessibility and too many features did at least partially contribute to the milieu that drove us all back to what is essentially MySpace.

Now, I finally bring in the article in the title. Go here if you wanna read it for yourself:

https://www.lifewire.com/why-experts-say-spacehey-wont-replace-facebook-5112487

No, I don’t plan on actually rebutting a single point in the article. Instead, I plan on rebutting its entire premise. The question of whether Spacehey will replace Facebook is a red herring, my dude.

1.)    Because, as I mentioned with Instagram and Twitter, neither platform replaced Facebook successfully. (In fact, if I’m not mistaken, Instagram was eventually taken over by Facebook because ol’ Zucc was threatened by its success.) Instead, Twitter, at least, stayed loyal to its signature features (and its initially loose regulation) and remained a competitor. Meanwhile, platforms like Tumblr, Reddit and VampireFreaks (God, does that place still exist?) remained loyal to their small niches, even if they didn’t become the social network of choice for grandma and grandpa.

2.)    Because MySpace users probably don’t want Spacehey to replace Facebook. (Well, I kinda do. But I’m vengeful. And I’m still sore about the changes that were made in 2011.) We just wanted to keep our MySpace 1.0 profiles and to keep chugging on with the social network of our choice. It was fine if all our friends wanted to migrate to the idiot receptacle that is Facebook. There was no need for anyone to replace anyone. But of course, Zucc is a fucking psychopath, so…

With that being said, I can only hope that An can keep up with the pressure of keeping Spacehey. Hopefully he will learn from MySpace’s mistake and keep the platform loyal to its users. In the meantime, let me go figure out how I can put some icons into my “About Me” section.