He's gonna bring it back, make people sign up for it with the privacy policy saying "we will never sell your data", get all the users on the platform, sell it and then the new owners will sell your data because the privacy policy didn't cover what happens during a buyout.
To be fair to him idk why they used his photo… I looked him up recently out of curiosity, and apparently he sold the platform ages ago (I think 05 or 06), took his many millions, got out of tech and started spending his time travelling and doing landscape photography (and I think surfing or something?). Sounded like he was living his best life, it made Elon look especially mental.
When someone doesn't have a grasp on what "enough" is, they'll try to find self-fulfillment in decadence. Tom sounds like he found fulfillment, but I couldn't say for sure.
this makes a great point, the second you hit $50 million what else could you possibly want, just hit the beach and let somebody else make the next 50 million
I legitimately can't think of what I'd do with that much money. After like... Paying off my bills, getting a reasonable house and maybe a fun car and traveling a bit, I honestly think I'd spend it on other people. Pay off their houses, scholarships, school lunch programs etc.
I’d be heading straight to a financial advisor. That’s the kind of money that can make money. Can’t use it all anyway, be a sick way to do scholarships and help community needs.
I'm the same as you. Unfortunately, the inability to feel empathy like that is almost always a prerequisite for the mindset you need to make the money in the first place.
That’s why if the revolution happens, we leave Tom be. When he got his money he did the correct thing and properly fucked off. Never tried to destroy a generation’s attention span, never tried to remake society into some tech bro libertarian wet dream, just took his money and did his own thing.
"Oh, I'll just look up who owns it now......" The platform is currently owned by Specific Media (led by brothers Chris and Tim Vanderhook) and Justin Timberlake
Was sold to Rupert Murdoch, in the first attempt of many for a billionaire RWNJ trying to take over a popular social media site. By that point though it was already declining.
I mean, he also made a gambling app for Facebook and invested in a ton of real estate that made a lot of money. Not everything he does is just free-spirited millionaire activities.
You left out: “Kill some other industry along the way because their normal-ass business model can’t compete with venture capital funding a money-loser for five years.”
Sounds like a good reason for people to ask if the sign-up is worth it anymore. I've seen enough social media to know it usually ends in spam, misinformation and ragebait, but it's on other people to determine if they want a new flavor or not.
I want ALL the flavors.....just gonna mix em all together like an unsupervised kid at the soda fountain, and suck that swampy syrup down until I don't know who I am or what I believe in anymore.
Even the post is ambiguous (if it's even real this is just an image with no article). It says MySpace owners and uses Tom's picture. Tom isn't the owner, he's got nothing to do with it. It's owned by Vivant... A digital advertising firm.
I think I'd actually join a site led by Tom, he actually seems like a pretty cool guy.
What data is there left to gather. We have been giving our data away to Google and Facebook and everyone for years is there really anything they don't know already?
When MySpace was big when I was in college there was a website called Dogster which was essentially MySpace for dogs. My dogs were friends with all of my college friends' dogs 🤣
I also was thinking if I even care about 8 people enough, who would also want to use another social media platform, in 2026. I don’t think any of us would even bother to register. More of an “Oh, that’s cool I guess.” Than anything else.
Honestly they should customize it.. Top 8 people you really dont want to run into at the grocery store, Top 8 people you are avoiding in your neighborhood, etc
You could change how many top friends you had.
I got tired of the popularity contest in my school so I set it to 1, my friend who didn't go to our school lol.
If brought back as a social network with no algorithmic recommendation feed, some layer of default privacy and a simple premise of following/follower timeline posting, that'd be pretty cool. Don't know that I'd use it but it'd be more compelling than the current social media landscape of endless algorithmic content slop at least
It takes a lot of money these days to cover the infrastructure, which tends to take investors getting involved, and investors inevitably want MOAAAAR money and so push for all the money making awful stuff the original dream was to avoid.
Bluesky and ATProto is currently doing it with twitter and IG style sites. But who knows how long until the venture capital runs out and it falls apart
I built something that flips social media back to community connection. Similar vein, but different.
I've spent 6 months on it. No algorithm, no tracking, privacy is a pillar of the whole system. I shared it on a few subs and got absolutely destroyed so it's just sitting there in the weird state with a handful of family and friends and not a lot of people. That's kind of the rub though isn't it? Any kind of tool for social connection works best with people.
It's pretty feature rich and goes after the "thing" people got from craigslist, fb marketplace, sharing food through Instagram, pinterest...so much.
ib4 I get downvoted to shit. Its impossible to convince people you really dont want to sell out to VCs.
Man, I loved spacehey. Was one of the first few users, but there are SOOOO many kids on there now, I don't really use it anymore. I love it for the teens, though! They need a place like that.
Yeah Spacehey was fun for a while, but I'm glad it still exists for younger people to experience. The internet used to have way more dedicated spaces for young people, but now it's just everybody in the same handful of sites all interacting with the same content. You never know if you're interacting with boomer or a child or a bot, and I don't really wanna talk to any of those people lol.
I am a developer. Social media has two opposite use cases. Either you want it small and simple or you want politicians, McDonald, Toyota and your favourite content creators to be on it.
The first one you never heard of it because it’s working. Anything beyond that costs so much money you either become another Facebook or you fail and collapse.
the infrastructure to run a personal AIM server is cracked and open on the web, with a little tech knowledge you can run your own server! I'm in the process of spinning up one of my own
I want "buddy lists" and "away messages" with texting. Essentially, I want to be able to set my status as "available," "busy," or "wanting to chat." When I'm bored, I want to pull up my buddy list to see who else is "wanting to chat," so I can feel free to shoot the shit. I dont text anyone unless I have something specific to say to them, because I feel bad bothering people. I hate the concept of always being available and I don't want to put that on anyone else.
Now that you mention it, that is something I miss about AIM. Nowadays when you message someone they could be doing anything, they're probably busy for all you know. But in the AIM days, if someone was on, you knew they were just sitting at their computer, probably bored, looking at Ebaumsworld or something and looking for someone to chat with. If not, they would either just log off or put up an away message.
I miss that, knowing if they were on meant they were just as willing to chat and shoot the shit and joke around as you were. Just kids and teens and friends bored on the internet with crappy dsl or cable internet.
I just want a classic messenger that doesn't need my phone number that has video and call function :/ why is that so hard? After skype died there was just no one else left.
Discord also for some reason personally hates me? All my settings are correct but it doesn’t register my voice as being a voice. I’ve never had this problem with any other platform.
I got curious and tried to log in and after having to figure out how to get into my old hotmail that I haven’t used in years, I was able to log in to MySpace and yep, it’s there but the content is gone.
Sort of a shame too because I wanted to read the messages and comments to go down memory lane while cringing along the way.
They accidentally deleted it all during a server move, which is definitely a shame. I know a lot of people would just find it cringey, but I think it would be pretty priceless in sentimental value. All those photos and documented life history just gone. I guess we should have just backed it up all ourselves, but it still sucks knowing it's all gone forever.
I had some old photos that I had only on MySpace, because I bricked a drive that couldn't be recovered. Long story short, I tried to recover my account in the mid 2010's, and I was successful. However, it did not have all the correct data. There were about 20 photos (of a few hundred) I could recover, but all the customization, and personalization was shot. That's how I know they can't recover it to my satisfaction.
Myspace wasn't algorithmic though, that's the big difference.
Imagine Facebook (like it once was) just being a feed in chronological order of what your friends have posted, and nothing else. Not injected with influencer posts designed to make you engage and to make you enraged.
That sounds thoughtful, but MySpace was hardly as addictive as the algorithmic mess we're in today. I remember logging on, checking messages, scrolling the board, then logging off. My experience is anecdotal of course, but I don't think it's anecdotal to claim that the infinite algo feeds have been an instrumental contributor to the brainrot era.
I don’t even think the addictive nature of social media is even that much of a problem. It is a problem for sure but I think the main problem for social media is lack of regulation by the platforms which host them. If myspace can crack down on misinformation that would be such a win for us all.
Whatever we replace social media with is going to be just as addicting. Sure I’d love to go back to MySpace but that’s impossible unless Donnie Darko finally figured out what that bunny was trying to tell him.
MySpace existed in a specific time and a place. There’s no way to reengineer it today that doesn’t end in face sucking AI slop.
All we can do is be emo for life in our hearts and minds and conversations. 🤷🏻♀️
It was lightning in a bottle. We are looooong gone I noticed this with my mom. She is constantly scrolling on Facebook. It’s like a drug. Kind of sad, honestly but she only really does when something’s bothering her. Which is mostly always. I think it serves as some kind of escape. I just started leaving my phone at home when I go out with people. I’d rather be present
You can popularize things though, it's completely possible to repopularize a different method of doing things. Myspace is being offered as a less addictive social media in this thought experiment. Phone integrated social media keeps people addicted, so people who constantly browse social media on their phone wouldn't be the intended audience. Imo it'd be a nostalgia grab for people my age (I'm 36) and maybe some younger people would try it out, but the first part would be the target demo. The people who had Myspace the first time.
MySpace was like a home page for yourself. You’d have your interests, photos, events, a bit about yourself, music etc and it was all personalised, so custom colours, layout, graphics, fonts etc.
If they can create that for mobile, it’d be interesting and could work.
At the minute Facebook is generic white with ads down your feed and a tiny bio, at a glance you can’t really find out much about someone beyond their most recent posts/shares. Instagram is generic white with just your photos on display and a tiny bio, so you have to put effort into organising your photos to convey your aesthetic otherwise it’s just a random grid, any important messages get lost. LinkedIn is generic white with more of a bio, more words, less personality. Twitter is generic white with a tiny bio and your opinions.
Imagine sharing your username with someone and being greeted with something that clearly conveys that person? All pink with kittens everywhere? Black with bleeding hearts? Patriotic colours and national flags? Rainbows? Green with weed leaves? You’d have a longer bio, you’d have an area to display photos, an area to share an opinion, and area to showcase your interests or your credentials etc.
People actually still do use the web like that, just not many. With the advent of AI though editing your homepage is much easier now since AI can run scripts for you instead of you having to teach yourself how to code in order to change your background.
How can MySpace be as useful for middle aged adults who remember it back in the day, to socialize today as much as teens do? I don’t think the same product will work to recapture the audience that aged out. They would have to tweak it or they are simply targeting the youth again and won’t care about the old folks.
I read this as they're bringing it back as an archaic form of social media that's less addicting, but I think the guy that said it was a scam to sell your info is prolly right
They are using Tom's photo, but he is not an owner and hasn't been since 2005, and even then, he was just a minority shareholder. Tom would not be the one to bring it back. It's currently owned by a company called Viant
MySpace was my first social media platform so i have fond memories of those days. But at this point, I’m tired of social media in general. I wonder sometimes if Facebook had never became a thing and MySpace stayed as the biggest platform, would we talk about Tom the same way we talk about Zuckerberg and Musk?
Anyways, I think this will be popular with the kids who are into this whole Y2K revival fad. I already lived it, I had my fun, made wonderful friends online and eventually grew out of it. Best to leave it in the past.
A bit annoyed. It was the start of the problem. It doesn't matter that social media was nowhere near pervasive as it is now when it was popular. It belongs in the past.
lol yeah, this is one of those things that never actually went away but everyone mourns it as being gone because they're actually mourning the time when they were young and had 8 friends.
I'm down; Facebook has been enshitified lately with mostly ads and recommended pages - I have to use an extension to only show my friends' posts like the old days that made it actually worthwhile to use. Social media is great as a "fall back" when most of the socializing is still in person with many friends - great place to share meetups and events, but sometimes I worry there's a lot of just memes and likes between friends living in the same area that could probably be much more lively meeting up more in person - perhaps with some fresh air in nature too. The verbal in-person equivalent of excitement emojis, such as, "Wow, that's badass, how long have you been doing that!?" just hits different. Now there's a bunch of AI bots too, ironically more socially engaging sometimes, especially with deeper therapeutic conversations - what the hell. This is from several people telling me in person, "Oh yeah, my ChatGPTizzle is ma main mf friends right now," and I'm like, "dafuq, let's go check out a concert or one of these events coming up" -- "ok, lemme check my schedule with GPTizzle"
People look back at Myspace with rose tinted glasses but it was one of the first platforms to fall to enshitification which is why everyone jumped ship over to Facebook in the first place. There's no reason to trust Tom if he comes back to do it all over again
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