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  • Hacker News
  • Loved MySpace. Keep a dumb parody of it for myself: https://myspace.kyle.foo/
    by andelink
  • It already exists: https://spacehey.com/

    PS: not a user, so caveat emptor

    by BoingBoomTschak
  • it was a show HN once:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740

    I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.

    by customguy
  • Isn't the internet a social network? Get a website. put vacation photos up. no ads. use AI to add chat, messaging, blogging, discussion forums, and a web ring. why do things like facebook/myspace exist at all?
    by dwh452
  • Step 1: Get a website.
    by pessimizer
  • it is. the problem is that it doesn't have a marketing budget and big tech that has the biggest ones use it to attack the open web.
    by brazukadev
  • Do you think the average person can properly handle security issues and spam? Maybe a static site is fine.
    by Farow
  • Talk to younger people (and not only) today about the way they use the internet. Many of them no longer visit third-party websites at all. They only use walled gardens through dedicated phone apps.

    Sure, you can get a website and put whatever you want there. But it simply won't get any meaningful amount of visitors. (By contrast, early-millennium web content was popular enough that real-life subcultures could bond over following the same blogs and other sites.)

    by TFNA
  • Ah, MySpace, I think I made thousands of custom MySpace themes, hacking their complete lack of html escaping to change the layout. I wonder if they'd stil allow that same level of jankiness
    by coolgoose
  • I can see large amounts of exploits and scams being a thing these days.
    by bamboozled
  • > "You could be authentic on MySpace," she says. "Upload raw images, no filters. You could have snot coming out your nose and nobody would judge."

    Did that have to do with the website or with the culture of the entire internet? Or maybe the entire world?

    I heard a prediction that ultra low production value (e.g. live streaming in a bathrobe) will become a great community building strategy over the next year or two, because nobody would use AI to make themselves look disheveled, therefore they must be a real person, therefore I can trust them.

    ---

    On a related note I'm now seeing everyone's faces being smooth out by weird AI filters. I thought it was YouTube doing it but it seems to be either the person's camera or video editing software. (For example stock footage in the same video often does not have the same plastic skin effect.)

    Does anyone know where that comes from? I find it very jarring and I'm not sure if the content creators are even aware that it's being done to their content. I remember an old phone of mine would do it automatically and I had to turn it off.

    by andai
  • When MySpace came out browsers were only able to upload images and not manipulate them with filters like today.

    Now cameras on devices like the iPhone will auto “enhance” at the system camera layer

    by tylerchilds
  • I don't want the website back particularly but I would quite like some of the photos taken of me between 2004 and 2006 which no longer exist anywhere
    by walthamstow
  • Millennials would collectively pay good amounts of money for that. Billions, perhaps.
    by copperx
  • Talk about rose-colored glasses and "the good ol' days". All I can remember are the animated gifs flash and spinning around on people's pages...
    by iansmith_hn
  • I could go for some pages that look bad vs the homogenized social media where everyone's page is the same.
    by duxup
  • I feel bad for you then if this is all you remember about Myspace.

    I met so many cool people in real life I never would have other wise it would be hard to even count.

    by tacktal
  • True, but it was all quite harmless. Today's perfectly designed web sites are made by folks who know exactly how to make you addicted to the algorithmic feed and whatnot.
    by classified
  • That's what I miss. Some level of personality is desperately missing from modern alternatives.
    by iinnPP
  • I miss that quite a lot. For the past 20 years the Web has been a sterile wasteland full of minimalist white and grays and 0 personality.
    by drooopy
  • Pages with personality like that are not just examples of how bad UX can be, they are examples of how UX can be used as an artistic form of self-expression.
    by SpaceL10n
  • The fact MySpace "accidentally" deleted all their pictures a few years ago is such a loss to internet history. Try looking for images for any music artist that was around during peak MySpace but not now.
    by Thev00d00
  • They can try to bring back something resembling the MySpace experience, but they can't bring back the millions of songs they deleted in 2018 with no backup. That was a great crime against modern music history.
    by TazeTSchnitzel
  • Yeah, lost some of my first bands music from this. Admittedly our fault for misplacing the masters but hey we were kids
    by andelink
  • And the images too! I've been trying to fill in images for artists big in that time period and it's just sad.
    by Thev00d00
  • My first paid software gig was making a famous person's MySpace page. I got my first software job because of this. So I have a real soft spot for MySpace.

    I made a fun thing this week for nostalgia:

    https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/

    by kilroy123
  • Be careful with this site, the footer on each page claims "no tracking" but it's very chatty to it's "engagement" backend with some odd looking numbers included.

      POST https://allthedamn.tools/api/pa/event
  {"n":"pageview","v":36,"u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","d":"allthedamn.tools","r":"https://news.ycombinator.com/"}  
  {"n":"engagement","sd":93,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/","e":32684,"v":36}
  {"n":"engagement","sd":100,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","e":2983,"v":36}
    Every page is already a GET call so if they want metrics on which tools are being used they can use the server access logs but they're choosing to use this extra layer of engagement tracking for some reason.

    The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.

      POST https://allthedamn.tools/cdn-cgi/rum?
  {"resources":[],"referrer":"https://allthedamn.tools/gif-maker/","eventType":1,"firstPaint":[REDACTED],"firstContentfulPaint":[REDACTED],"startTime":[REDACTED],"versions":{"fl":"2024.11.0","js":"2026.6.0","timings":1},"pageloadId":"[REDACTED]","location":"https://allthedamn.tools/word-counter/","nt":"navigate","timingsV2":{"nextHopProtocol":"h3","transferSize":16584,"decodedBodySize":98788},"dt":"","siteToken":"[REDACTED]","st":2}
    The privacy policy claims these are "privacy-friendly analytics"

    The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.

      GET https://allthedamn.tools/favicon.svg
  304 Not Modified
  cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate
    by cube00
  • I roasted MySpace hard back in the day, but now I kind of miss it. I was all too happy to move over to Facebook and leave MySpace behind.

    For me, the exodus from MySpace to Facebook marks the inflection point were smaller internet communities died and were replaced with services from megacorps.

    At the time, MySpace was an echo of free homepage sites on providers like AngelFire and Geocities. My friend group had moved over to MySpace from a custom site our friend hosted on a server in his living room. His web site did pretty much everything that MySpace did, MySpace just did it better.

    I don't want MySpace back, but I do want some of the cool interactive content back that seems to all but have died out.

    by emursebrian
  • Can you tell me more about that? The cool interactive content. I'd love to hear more details about your experience and what you miss.

    For me the main thing I miss is Flash. I know there's Ruffle as Flashplayer replacement but the culture around Flash (and most of the authoring tools) has basically died.

    (I talked to a bunch of Flash animators I knew back in the day and every single one was surprised to hear that Flash is still available, they just changed the name. Big fail on Adobe's part...)

    As for the cute 90s and 2000s web designs, have you seen NeoCities? That spirit is alive and well there :)

    The other thing I miss is that everyone would put their email in their form signature and you could just add everyone on MSN. People were super chill in those days, I made a lot of friends that way.

    Nowadays the only unsolicited messages I get are from people trying to sell me something.

    by andai
  • Strangely, I kinda see it being the first thing where "everyone must get into".

    Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.

    But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.

    After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.

    by whstl