21–30 of 79 posts
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days. Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days. Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days. Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
Damn that analogy hits hard.
myspace was a social network. Today we have no social networks. Zuckerberg has turned Facebook into.. frankly I don't even know what it is. But it's not about getting updates from your friends. instagram took that place but he fucked that one up too by mutating it into a cheap tiktok clone instead. Social networks are now just influencer/media produced slob to be consumed by the masses. A Youtube with shorter clips.…
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…
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.
I can see why people might want it to come back, but I don't think bringing it back will bring back the good old days. Much of that was made the early web less shit was people being more mentally stable by having most of their social interactions happen for real offline, rather than clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today.
MySpace was notorious for people with social problems who weren't getting out much. Bedroom musicians were able to share tunes and get buzz that they wouldn't have been able to achieve before, since they couldn't manage the in-real-life socialization needed for self-promotion.
It was great for budding musicians of all types though
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...
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.
Print designers were adapting to the web and there was a tremendous amount of technique, experience and hard work in that first batch.
Then the dictatorship of the sameness started, and we somehow ended in a world where everything kinda looks the same but is slightly different in slightly broken ways. Creativity be damned, but also other things like performance, accessibility and user-centricity are now secondary to following fashions.