Some (myself partially included) view Web 3.0 as the answer: decentralized, crypto/blockchain-based internet platforms where no company stands in the way of expression. However, if current sentiment of NFTs and cryptocurrencies persist, the pushback for this standard can prove so powerful that even the big businesses dipping their toes, knees, and in Facebook's case, necks into related technologies might have to back off. Even with SpaceHey's relative nicheness, we have a group of ~2k members (at time of writing) against the modern web, and generally against the proposed Web 3.0. 

All of this can be summed as such: the modern web is sanitized, and SpaceHey is part of the dirt in the wound the world needs right now.

I want to use this blog post to do some analysis: I want to talk about this site, its features, why I'm here, maybe why you're here, and some personal criticisms of this site or age of the internet we're seeking to replicate. 

SpaceHey returns to us something that was lost with the acceptance and modernization of the internet: the mess. Part of the old net's charm was how wild, wacky, and unique everything could be. If you click on my profile, you'll be met (as of now) with a short gif of a black hole. Once that fades, you'll be met with a grotesque mishmash of aesthetics. Grey and purple accents with a eldritch horror of a background; the search bar glitching with the line. "I'm tired". Yes, I did in fact copy the Sad Boi Aesthetic layout and change it a little. But if you click on someone else's profile, your experience can change dramatically. It could be pastel and artsy. It could be completely bare; you never know until you click. 

It's disorganized. Finding people with your interests is now an adventure. On Twitter, if I select a few interest tags, the site will continue to show me people who have either chosen similar tags, or likely post about those things. Then, as I follow and like posts and people, the site will show me people who also follow the people I do, or people similar to those who've I've followed. To overanalyze, it gives the connotation that we're all a conglomerate mass, and not individuals. It's also lazy. You never have to search for anyone, the site does all the searching for you. 

As you might know, SpaceHey doesn't employ such algorithms. If I go to my profile now, it'll show me "Cool New People", who I can only assume are very new to the site, and nothing else. All I know about them is their profile. I have to actually put forth the effort to click on said profile to determine if we have anything in common. If we don't then I've "wasted time" by not accomplishing my goal. But I don't believe the time was wasted, because in the event that I find someone that fit my interests, then I can feel rewarded for my effort. The old internet philosophy also allows for much better specialization. Groups and forums have mostly been phased out for admittedly more convenient options (like Discord), but the older methods again require more effort to access and maybe because of that, you bond much more closer to the people you meet. 

YouTube. If you're old enough to remember MySpace, you're likely old enough to remember the some of the things YouTube used to be. Do you remember when YouTube had a rating feature? It was an out-of-5 star rating you could give to a video. Along with likes and dislikes (the latter of which have now been essentially removed entirely). Remember the lightsaber jokes about the like and dislike bar? Remember video responses, an efficient way a user could make replies to another via the platform's video format? Remember annotations? There's plenty more that I'm sure even I don't remember, but here's the real question: do you remember YouTube's slogan? For years, it shared precious space with the logo until it was removed in 2012. It was Broadcast Yourself. 

Like a lot of social websites around YouTube's creation, YouTube also gave users the ability to customize their profile. You can take a lot at any profile from Vidlii (the YouTube version of what SpaceHey's doin here) to get a taste of what that was like. This motto was significant for a reason, because it gave users the ability to do something sorely missing from the current web's standards: to make your internet presence a home. One of the reasons I'm on this website right now is because my profile is more than a blurb about me, a profile, and maybe a banner if I'm lucky. It's an unfiltered space of artistic and emotional freedom and vulnerability that the current fathers of the internet have asked us to forsake. Your profile here on SpaceHey is as "you" as you care to make it. Layouts help, or you can learn to code and make something completely bespoke. It's the reason I've been so attracted to Discord customization, because Discord stops being a mass-produced product and becomes a "me" produced product. SpaceHey, and sites like it, are less of a streamlined experience and more of a framework that you create your own experiences from. And you do truly have to make your own experiences. It's harder for people to just fall into your lap, you have to do the searching as previously stated. 

Money. It's always money. 

Ok, well, it's not just money. There's quite a bit about the old web that that we honestly either don't want back, or are better of currently without. Let's start with the money first.

Money makes the world go 'round, as the saying goes. Current internet is heavily profit-driven. YouTube is less about creative venturing, and more about consistent, repeatable viewership using strategies to make your video as palatable as possible, offending the least number of people, and being monetizable. Most people who started a channel nearing its inception did it for the goofs and gaffs, and found fame along the way. Nowadays, you start a channel with stars in your eyes, and already typed "how to grow your channel" into the search bar (or you might've done that before even starting). The internet at large turned into this profit-driven hellhole simply because the impact and importance of the internet was growing. It was a new and expanding niche, and people were keen to take advantage of that. Who needs to go to the library or the book store when you can just buy a book online? You can read it from the comfort of your home after all, just a small convenience and shipping fee over the bookstore price and you're all set. Why go store shopping for your tech when you can order it online and have it delivered just a little later? Saves you time. Hey, this guy on the internet makes some really cool art, maybe I can pay him a bit to draw me something. I'm not interested in going too deep into exactly what the timeline was for monetizing the internet, but when you're making money anywhere, people get interested. You get more suppliers, and advertising or word of mouth brings more customers. In fact, that's probably what it really was that blew the internet up; ads. 

The internet created a convenient and extremely effective way to connect businesses to customers that simply didn't and couldn't exist in a pre-internet era. Companies like Google and Facebook became goliaths in this space, being particularly popular for smaller ad companies to go through and serve you ads. Over time, as companies got craftier in getting more information from you, the ads got better, more personalized. If a company can predict you need something as you're thinking about it, you're more likely to purchase a product. Think about it; are you in a hurry to replace your fridge if it's working perfectly fine? Or are you more likely to make a fridge purpose if your fridge has issues? Business is as much about timing as it is about product quality, after all. 

But money isn't the only thing that soured the internet. Unfettered and unmoderated spaces always have a chance to go awry. Moderation nowadays has its own issues, but the wild west mentality of the old net isn't without issues itself. It bred a generation of boomers who thought that the solution to the very real problem of cyberbullying was to just turn off your computer. This thought process was founded on the attitude that the internet and reality were still completely separate entities. If you're old enough, you might recall your parents warning your that your internet friends aren't your "real" friends. You were young at the time, and your parents probably meant well, but despite any positive or negative experiences that it might've caused, younger you actually new better. You were ahead of the time. Your internet friends were, in some sense, part of your "real" friends, and it's true now more than ever; and even back then, the internet did in fact have real world impact. 

The novice nature of the internet back then also gave way to a new form of crime. White Collar crime, as it's called, came with the internet. No need to break into a bank if you can just have someone give you their credit card information themselves. Nigerian Prince, anyone? It hasn't happened yet (to my knowledge) on here, but giving users to put their own HTML into their pages can hide malicious code that can do who knows what kind of damage. 

I've said before that SpaceHey is the dirt in the wound, but the internet back then was already post-apocalyptic: anything, anywhere could do you harm at any moment. The philosophy of the old net was a mess, but the overall disorder could make it dangerous. All we really needed to do was organize it a bit, and we can have what we call most of our rooms: and organized mess. 

The internet overcorrected. A good part of that process was money; ensuring consumer safety (outwardly, at least) meant that people were more likely to use your service, especially in contrast to less-secure alternatives. But outside of that, if you were told that you can get a virus easily on the internet, or get scammed real easy, would you be interested in the internet? Possibly, but I don't blame people who weren't. The internet needed a dust-up, but while we were removing the objectively bad aspects about the old net, we started getting an itch. We wanted to spice things up a bit. Rearrange the room a bit, ya know? The internet nowadays, compared to the old times, is very clean. Things are organized to an almost inhuman degree, with actually inhuman methods of categorizing content and information being implemented and continually being improved. The mess of looking of the internet looked...immature. Refinement was necessary. UI and UX became fields of study, utilizing buttons, colors, and other visual aspects in order to herd people into certain experiences. Dark UX for the particularly nasty. Cyberbullying was and is a real problem. But there's so many people on the internet nowadays, and not enough people to hire to make sure people are in line. The solution? Code. Code moderates people's behavior and are usually the first judge on whether or not you can have access to a site. And oftentimes, it's the only judge. But speaking of judges, what exactly is Cyberbullying? What's bad? What's good? Remember those convenience benefits from earlier? What if we cranked it to up to 11? 12? 20? What's the catch? Not much, just some info. Maybe misusing the labor market a little. A lot.

Somewhere along the way, we allowed ourselves to become the product of every company under the sun, and to this day, most people are ok with that, so as long as the convenience associated with the trade continues to be, well, convenient. Even I'm willing to admit that I'm part of the problem. I'm lazy as shit, and as long as I can stay lazy (for the most part), you can take just about anything, so as long as it doesn't seriously inconvenience me. And this attitude made us lose some of the most beautiful aspects of the internet.

No, not completely. Even this site is a elaborate dollhouse that all of us agree to play pretend in. I can build a home here, but it's just not the same. Everyone knows it. The homes we built back in the day were authentic; the cheery eyes of a child being able to be the ball of creativity that basically every child is. It was novel. It's nostalgic. Nowadays, the majority of people who find this place are likely adults- people who remember and pine for the good ol' times, and want a taste of what they remember to be such a fun time in their lives. We're less creative now, likely more cynical. We're not here because it's the only option, we're here because we're old enough to know that this is a better option. I don't doubt that a lot of you are here because you're rebelling against the current way of doing things, as a statement. That isn't to say that some people aren't here who aren't pretty young, or are just here because they heard about the features and liked the idea (that's me!); but part of the reason MySpace was so magical and influential was because it was the best. It was popular. Everyone was on it, and the place to be. Nowadays, this site's joining the counterculture, a genre that, by its nature, can't get too popular without threatening the original foundation the site was built on. When people think of a social media, MySpace is a fun memory, not a current option. It isn't, but SpaceHey is the closest thing to it we have (to my knowledge), and people are probably so entrenched in their current offerings of social medias, that they probably don't care much for what this one has to offer. They'll chose the convenience of having information and content handed to them, rather than needing to seek out their own experiences. This website is doomed to obscurity, doomed to financial death, or doomed to conform. That isn't to say that you're not allowed to enjoy your time here, or even to invest time into the site (I know I will), but we can't have back what was already lost. We can, however, appreciate the sound of an echo of a time not quite forgotten.

Modern web isn't all bad; and neither is the idea of trading convenience for...something. I think my biggest criticism of the website currently is, in fact, how raw it is. Coding has been a bane to the point of near trauma (I'm exaggerating), and needing to dip my head back into it in order to get any meaningful customization of my profile is...inconvenient. As far as I'm aware, there are tools that can help, but they only help streamline the coding process, rather than replacing it with something easier. Increased ease usually comes with reduced freedom, but for those of us with lower ambitions for our profile aesthetics, an alternative could be welcomed. 

This blog is also prohibitively long; it took me until I got to the "Why Did We Ever Leave" section to realize that there's probably no autosaving my current work, and that there's no dedicated "Save As Draft" button anywhere. If my internet/power went out at some point during this, you'd never see this. I guess posting this as a diary every blue moon is a "solution", but it's rather unwieldy and time-consuming. Kinda like making 1-2 line changes to layout code and needing to refresh both your edit profile tab (via saving your changes) and your profile in order to see the results of your changes.

Why does the "LogOut" button have a capital "O"? Looks kinda funky to my eyes, and I'm not sure if I like it or not. 

It'd also be neat to add a word count to the blog entry UI somewhere, because I'm curious as to how long this multi-hour project truly is. I know I can just paste this into Word, but this is a pretty basic feature that would be nice to have just right here. 

If you read this whole thing and are reading this now, thanks for your time. I'll make sure to keep wasting it in the future.