The obvious answer is "no", but it makes you wonder. The first wave of tech platforms that defined the online experience for millions (Aol, Myspace, Yahoo, etc) are now largely gone. Will the history repeat with the giants of today?
On one hand, we see some signs of that. For example, Facebook is no longer "cool" with younger folks. On the other hand, Meta has so much $$$ that they can try to reinvent themselves or acquire "cool" platforms, thus ensuring corporate continuity even if Facebook fizzles out - they have Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
Those first platforms didn't have the same market cap. The current tech giants have so much money they can keep acquiring companies to stay relevant (line Facebook).
They’re just kind of big ol’ moneyballs with easier access to at-cost resources. But even then they’re so big getting those resources can feel like you don’t even work at the same company.
there were so many 'waves', so many years apart, that I have a hard time lumping them all together.
aol and yahoo, maybe. aol was much earlier, but they both hit max valuation at around the same 2000-01 period.
myspace hit max valuation at 05-06. 5 years might as well have been a century at that point in history with the amount of flux in that industry.
my first wave was the tail end of BBSs and the beginning of the walled gardens of compuserve and aol. a bit later came The Palace, The Well, and various other (incredibly formative and impactful) social cliques.
The social aspects was what separated the 'waves' for me, and the gradual shift from an idealist concept to something more corporate.
Purely as a matter of interest, Compuserve was founded in 1969 as a business offering time-sharing on minicomputers. It opened to the public in something very much like the form you're remembering in 1979. This later date is roughly contemporaneous with the first BBSes.
I also remember Compuserve in the same mental slot as AOL and Prodigy, but it considerably predated them.
I had sort of forgotten but MySpace was really read-write web/web 2.0 era, i.e. post dot-bomb. There was really a whole wave of companies and behaviors, e.g. blogging, that weren't really part of the original dot-com era at all but the wave of the late 2000s companies.
The worry is that the current players are too big to be disrupted. Reddit and Twitter turned openly hostile to users last year and few people left. There's a critical mass of docile users that are no longer willing to start over elsewhere.
How can Reddit and Twitter turn openly hostile to users? They're just platforms for users to submit posts. I haven't seen a major change in Reddit since the UI overhaul in 2018. And even that I wouldn't call hostile. Just annoying. And it can be worked around.
That's what yahoo was doing until it's board decided to "focus" their efforts. If I recall correctly they had an investment in something that they sold way too early and would have made a killing.
I spent quite a bit of time a few years ago recovering my old MySpace account only to realize they “messed up” (unclear whether it was incompetence, or purposeful) and deleted basically anything that had been, oh I dunno, actually interesting: pictures, videos, playlists…you can’t even see the profile pictures of people in your friends list.
In the rush to move to whatever the next big social media was, I’d never thought about backing up my stuff because why would it ever be gone and why would I care? Lesson learned.
I was weirdly bummed out about it. Back when the site first launched I spent loads of time learning HTML just to customize my page before I realized site profile generators existed.
There's a community of people (myself included) who still use old tech from that era like iPods and GameBoy Advance. Both for nostalgia and fun, as well as disconnecting from our phones and the current social media.
Could there be a similar case for bringing back a low-fi social media not ruined by algorithms, either MySpace or something like it? I guess the network effects, i.e. the requirement of your friends being on there, make it more challenging for social media. But I think there's a possibility of some sort of community who want to be MySpace-Amish. Personally, I think the peak of my happiness with technology was around 2007 - 2010, but obviously age and personal nostalgia have an effect there.
> Could there be a similar case for bringing back a low-fi social media not ruined by algorithms, either MySpace or something like it?
Everybody that keeps reinventing Facebook/Twitter (Post.news, BeReal, BlueSky, etc) does so with dollar signs in their eyes. There are FOSS options for messageboards and IM services but people gravitate to the least-friction options, which lead to spam and flame wars because there's no cost to do so.
The problem with the FOSS options for these services is that they're a PITA to set up or use, and they usually cost money. It's not like using a FOSS alternative to Photoshop, where you just download Krita or Gimp and run it locally on your PC: with a service like Mastodon, it needs always-running servers, so you either have to have your own server on the internet (not really viable for most people), rent one from a colocation provider or other service ($$$), or pay a subscription fee to keep your instance on someone else's server ($). Now compare this to using Facebook, which is free. And since there's zero interoperability between different SNS services, you have to go where all your friends are.
I am interested in seeing something like the original MySpace. I'm not very active on it, but there is subreply.com (formerly sublevel) that made the HN frontpage a couple of times in the past.
I agree. It was reported that they lost all user data a while back.
> Myspace, the once mighty social network, has lost every single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos with no other home on the internet. [0]
I'm convinced that in 200 years time historians will know more about the daily life of an average person in the roman empire than they will someone around today. "The Internet never forgets" might have been true at one stage but is definitely no longer the case.
Arguably they were a social forerunner for Spotify.
At a time when record companies fought hard to keep their music off the internet MySpace talked all sorts of bands into uploading and streaming their songs on MySpace.
When I had a myspace, I learned how to get the CSS to completely cover the MySpace interface and built an actual website as my profile. That was probably one of the better introductions I had to HTML/CSS.
This is so weird. It's not an anniversary because it's a dead site. Show me anyone who's actually using it or content on it that recent and not auto-generated/populated. Multiple generations of content were lost. Do we celebrate or write about anniversaries of domains long abandoned who are still online but only have spamming casino/adult content it their place? No.
Readit News
On one hand, we see some signs of that. For example, Facebook is no longer "cool" with younger folks. On the other hand, Meta has so much $$$ that they can try to reinvent themselves or acquire "cool" platforms, thus ensuring corporate continuity even if Facebook fizzles out - they have Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
aol and yahoo, maybe. aol was much earlier, but they both hit max valuation at around the same 2000-01 period.
myspace hit max valuation at 05-06. 5 years might as well have been a century at that point in history with the amount of flux in that industry.
my first wave was the tail end of BBSs and the beginning of the walled gardens of compuserve and aol. a bit later came The Palace, The Well, and various other (incredibly formative and impactful) social cliques.
The social aspects was what separated the 'waves' for me, and the gradual shift from an idealist concept to something more corporate.
I also remember Compuserve in the same mental slot as AOL and Prodigy, but it considerably predated them.
The first were search engines like Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, free webhosts like Tripod and Angelfire (RIP GeoCities), and all those Usenet boards.
Now git off mah lawn ya greenhorns. :V
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Dead Comment
In the rush to move to whatever the next big social media was, I’d never thought about backing up my stuff because why would it ever be gone and why would I care? Lesson learned.
I was weirdly bummed out about it. Back when the site first launched I spent loads of time learning HTML just to customize my page before I realized site profile generators existed.
https://www.rackwareinc.com/myspace-data-loss
Could there be a similar case for bringing back a low-fi social media not ruined by algorithms, either MySpace or something like it? I guess the network effects, i.e. the requirement of your friends being on there, make it more challenging for social media. But I think there's a possibility of some sort of community who want to be MySpace-Amish. Personally, I think the peak of my happiness with technology was around 2007 - 2010, but obviously age and personal nostalgia have an effect there.
Everybody that keeps reinventing Facebook/Twitter (Post.news, BeReal, BlueSky, etc) does so with dollar signs in their eyes. There are FOSS options for messageboards and IM services but people gravitate to the least-friction options, which lead to spam and flame wars because there's no cost to do so.
Last I checked, it was some kind of low-budget social Spotify alternative, with most functions disabled, acting more like an archive than anything.
> Myspace, the once mighty social network, has lost every single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos with no other home on the internet. [0]
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/18/myspace-l...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19569865
At a time when record companies fought hard to keep their music off the internet MySpace talked all sorts of bands into uploading and streaming their songs on MySpace.
New social media is much less fun.
The business model of, "owned by somebody who can sell it", may be at the root.
The possibilities that existed then, exist now, if people want to make the effort to control their own lives.
Only if relaunched with ActivityPub support.