Long before Mark Zuckerberg was poking people and causing global political unrest with his algorithm, there was a place, a mystical, neon-lit corner of the internet called Myspace. If you weren’t there, you missed the golden age of online chaos, glitter gifs, emo bangs, and HTML-induced existential crises.
Let’s take a hilarious, eye-opening dive into the internet’s original teenage rave cave. Welcome back to Myspace, the pre-Facebook wasteland where your top 8 friends defined your social worth and your page could crash NASA’s servers if you added too many autoplay songs.
1. The Profile Page: A Personal Billboard on LSD
Myspace didn’t have “themes” or “default layouts.” No, no. You coded your profile. In raw, unfiltered HTML. One wrong </div> and your entire digital existence vanished into a black hole. This was social media meets hacker bootcamp.
People weren’t “users” on Myspace. They were web designers. Your page was your personality, if your personality was 43 glittery skulls, a panic! at the disco song on autoplay, and a background so busy it caused seizures in 3 states.
And God help anyone who dared use a default layout. Those people are probably still being judged in the afterlife.
2. The Top 8: A Brutal Social Hunger Games
Myspace let you publicly rank your friends in a top 8 list, a feature so savage it would make Game of Thrones look like Sesame Street. If someone dropped you from their Top 8, it was over. Friendships ended. Tears were shed. Phones were thrown. Bands were formed. Wars were declared.
It was passive-aggression with HTML armor.
Imagine if Instagram made you pick your 8 favorite followers and display them on your profile. Now imagine all your exes, coworkers, and emotionally unstable friends texting you at 3AM demanding to know why they’re #6.
Yeah. Myspace did that.
3. Tom: The First and Only Friend Who Never Judged You
Tom. Sweet, white-T-shirt-wearing, dry-erase-board-hugging Tom. He was everyone’s first friend, because he had to be. Tom didn’t care what music you liked. He didn’t shadowban your posts. He didn’t sell your data to anyone. He just… was.
Meanwhile, Zuckerberg acts like a Bond villain in a Patagonia hoodie. Tom? He cashed out early, bought an island, and probably spends his days painting sunsets with a cocktail in hand. Tom is the real hero of the internet.
4. Music Was a Religion, and Your Profile Was a Shrine
Your profile song said everything. Were you deep? Dashboard Confessional. Were you edgy? Slipknot. Were you a quirky girl who liked scarves and coffee? Regina Spektor.
The moment someone opened your page, the music blared, no consent, no warning, just instant emo. It was like an audio jumpscare from your soul.
You learned more about someone from their profile song than you could from 3 years of Instagram stalking. It was honest. It was raw. It was loud. It was beautiful.
5. Chaos, Freedom, and the Pre-Algorithm Era
There was no algorithm on Myspace. You saw what people posted in real-time, in all its unfiltered, unhinged glory. No one was selling you protein powder or manifesting in front of a ring light. There were no “content strategies.” You just posted whatever you felt.
A cryptic status like “feeling like the moon is lying to me again…” might get a dozen comments asking if you’re okay. Or not. And that was fine.
There were no influencers. There were only influenzas, because you stayed up until 3am rearranging your profile, eating Pop-Tarts, and forgetting to wear socks.
So What Happened?
We got older. Facebook swooped in like a clean-shaven hall monitor and said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if everything looked the same, and we had rules, and no one could play Fall Out Boy on their page?”
We said yes. Because we were tired. Tired of coding. Tired of drama. Tired of being dropped from Top 8s by Becky who knew exactly what she was doing.
But in choosing Facebook, we gave up a little freedom. A little weirdness. A little of our soul glitter.
Final Thoughts: The Ghost in the Glitter
Myspace was a mess. A glorious, rebellious, identity-affirming mess. It taught us to express ourselves, break things, and rebuild with rainbow fonts. It was a digital diary, a social experiment, and a live-action breakup simulator all rolled into one.
So next time you see a teen agonizing over TikTok views, gently whisper: “Before the algorithm ruled your life… we had Myspace. And we survived.”
And then put on your best studded belt, open LimeWire (if you dare) and salute Tom the original friend who never unfriended you.
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