MySpace returns as Myspace (or not)

Yesterday in the 1440 Daily Digest newsletter,

Myspace’s owners revealed in a yet-to-be publicly available documentary that they seek to relaunch the social media site. Owners Tim and Chris Vanderhook have not announced a date for relaunch as of this writing.

In the early 2000s, the site, then stylized as MySpace, became the world’s most popular social media platform. The company boasted 115 million monthly visitors by 2008; however, it was soon surpassed by Facebook. Despite a series of rebrands and ownership transfers in the 2010s, including one involving singer Justin Timberlake, the company never regained its status as a meaningful social media competitor.

CNBC covered this in some detail. “Excitement about Myspace’s relaunch reflects nostalgia for a more analog time, when algorithms were less dominant in our lives,” Kate Winick, a principal analyst at Forrester, told CNBC.

She added that

We’re seeing this in recent moves by both brands and users towards smaller, more private social experiences that feel less built for the algorithm and more personal to the individual user, like the explosion of growth on Substack and private communities on Discord.
Myspace has to balance users’ appetite for nostalgia with the clean interfaces, seamless discovery, and short-form content that have come to define modern social media.

If Myspace follows the traditional playbook, they’re simply the smallest game in town; if they lean too hard into old Myspace, they’ll struggle to meet the expectations of a generation who are used to a much cleaner and simpler user experience.

Then, in an are-we-being-dumbed-down-yes-we-are moment, she explained that the interface of the 2000s is comparably “labour-intensive,” especially for younger users who have grown up on TikTok and Instagram. “It’s unlikely that anyone who actually wants to spend less time online is going to decide to spend more time online to achieve an ‘offline’ aesthetic. They’d have to carefully thread that needle.”

Careful kids, that coffee might burn you. Let it cool before you drink it.