Those were the days

Ummm... when he sold MySpace he literally sold our data to NewsCorp?

Memes never lie!
Whaaaat TIL
In 2005, two years after launching the site, Anderson and DeWolfe sold Myspace to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $580 million. Afterward, Anderson continued working as the company's president. He retired from active involvement with Myspace in 2009 or 2010 as its popularity waned and Facebook usurped it as the most popular social networking site.
He then went to burning man and traveled and got into travel photography. Lives between Hawaii, LA, and vegas
I remember when NewsCorp bought MySpace and I was already on Facebook at the time. I knew that NewsCorp had been taken for suckers because it was plain as day that young people would all move to Facebook.
Of course, I no longer use Facebook, but it’s a lesson for business people. If you’re making an investment in something young people use, maybe ask young people something about it first.
As you get older, you really just lose touch with that kind of thing, so it’s understandable how a bunch of suits missed that and flushed half a billion dollars down the toilet.
- The data they got continued to be valuable to advertisers for decades
it cost 'em $580 million..... they got back, six years later, a whole $35 million when they unloaded it.
- The data and connections were what's important, algorithms need data, and that was as true back then as it is now.

Also MySpace was one of the first platforms to use a built-in targeted advertising model, and partnered with Google for both adserve, indexing, and search. To say they didnt sell data is the same as saying Facebook doesn't sell data, they were the data user, selling ad space based on profiling users.

He even made friends with all of us.

at the time we were like "this is some performative nonsense" but now with all of these awful tech billionaires and Tom's conducted himself, i do actually think he meant it when he said he did that because he thought everyone deserved to have a friend

first thing you were forced to look at. got worse;

.

Revisionist bullshit. Despite what came later, Facebook was the privacy-respecting alternative to MySpace at the time.

How was the "dumb fucks" platform ever privacy-respecting? The shit came out later, but it was always a privacy nightmare since the farmville days and even as "The Facebook"
edit: I just read another comment about the Google adserve partnership, didn't know that, guess I see your angle now. But still, it was only surface appearance of privacy, behind the scenes the Zucc has always been the same and doing their own tracking instead of partnering with someone else
- I don't know why are you so angry with poor Zucc. He just wanted to oogle his classmate's bathsuit pics, isn't that relatable?
My how things changed!
My memory of MySpace was creating over 2 dozen accounts and maxing out the Playlists.just a bunch of my favorite albums uploaded, as my friends 'private' music server.
Bullshit. Facebook asked for my real name and school email to sign up.
I don’t know that Facebook ever sold itself that way. It was privacy respecting perhaps only because it only allowed college students to sign up for it, so only your classmates could see what you were doing. However, shortly after launching Zuck came out with the news feed, which told everyone whenever you looked at their profile. People hated this! The news feed in general felt like a huge privacy violation and Zuck issued his first apology. Still, they kept the news feed.
Soon they also allowed photo sharing and this is how everyone got into trouble though, as people posted photos of themselves partying and then their friends tagged them in those photos and then a couple years later, Facebook let everyone’s parents in and by that point people were trying to get jobs. It quickly became clear that maybe sharing everything on Facebook wasn’t a good idea.
- Zuck promised flat out that there wouldn’t be any spying or surveillance, ever. That turned out to be a massive lie, of course (just as when Page & Brin told us in 1998 that they believed advertising was incompatible with search), but it was a big part of the draw of the early Facebook that you (seemingly) didn't have to choose between your friends and getting spied on by Rupert Murdoch & Co over at Myspace.

Fucking legend!

I'm legit jelly.

I read this the first time as "he didn't try to influence electrons"

Same here, got me really confused for a second
- Because you don’t know how he controls electrons? He’s just got rizz.

remember watching early ad spam and people saying, 'enjoy internet now because the advertisers are going to ruin it'. yep

myspace is where I started to learn html. there is a fan recreation website called spacehey that's like old-school myspace.

Yeah let's spread misinformation and romanticize the past so we can blame our problems on bad actors and bad times rather than recognize and address the systemic causes that have pervaded social media since its inception.

sorry for being so salty and sarcastic, in a weird mood rn

Nah you're right. I'll admit to having a bit of nostalgia for the old timey corp platforms of my youth, but tbh what we have now (with fedi) is better.
I do still think there was and is real value in independent little niche forums hosted on random domains, not federated to anything or linked to any social media or platform or anything. Just a cozy little phpbb or discourse between friends.
- forums are the best. i encounter ex-redditors here on the threadiverse who are like "well at least discord is better than old school forums" and i'm like "what am i missing that everyone thinks old school forums are so horrid"
Systems are made of people. So yeah, remove the bad actors and you already have a better system.
- Systems are also made of rules, and bad rules can turn good people into bad people. That's kind of the point of critical race theory
- Fair point. My rebuttal: The system here is manifold, a lack of general awareness and understanding, the legislative framework in most places, and most importantly, capitalism. The owners of social media are the most replaceable part of that, if Meta and Zuck imploded today, some other for-profit crap would fill the void
Are the people running modern social media not part of the system?
- Valid question but IMO, no. replacing Zuckerberg Musk etc would do nothing to solve the fact that capitalism runs social media as a for-profit enterprise

I appreciate him but MySpace definitely did collect data. Props to him for his photographer career and doing his own thing though

For example, in 2006, when Facebook decided to open its doors to the public – not just college kids with .edu addresses – they understood that most people interested in social media already had accounts on Myspace, a service that had been sold to master enshittifier Rupert Murdoch the year before. Myspace users were champing at the bit to leave, but they were holding each other hostage.
…
Those live, ongoing connections to people – not your old posts or your identifiers – impose the highest switching costs for any social media service. Myspace users who were reluctant to leave for the superior lands of Facebook (where, Mark Zuckerberg assured them, they would never face any surveillance – no, really!) were stuck on Rupert Murdoch's sinking ship by their love of one another, not by their old Myspace posts. Giving users who left Myspace the power to continue talking to the users who stayed was what broke the floodgates, leading to the "unraveling" that boyd observed.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/14/fire-exits/

Wow, I had no idea about the Facebook/MySpace message bridge bot. Definitely shows the power and importance of the various bridge/mirror projects like Bridgy. It says that the same kind of bot would now be Fedrally illegal in the US, but I haven't seen any specifics about that, and seems like the EU just made it mandatory to enable through APIs.
I have thought a bit about this and how to breakout of silos, and it seems like now with LLM tools accessing the browser it will be nearly impossible to prevent messaging and posts from being cross-platformed, though the compute cost would be higher than by using the old API method.
- You don't need llm to import posts from another website, just an API or scraper to fetch them. Much cheaper, faster and more reliable.

I'm jealous i was not computer literate enough when myspace was big, all i did back then was play flash games and watch smosh