the migration from myspace to facebook was a culture war.
people were taking a platform stance.
for a high school student when facebook dropped, the culture shift was palpable and polarizing. some kids were like "We use Facebook Now as we are Mature" because facebook was devoid of the ability to augment the interface.
facebook offered a clean experience that allowed for better gatekeeping and was focused on the individual experience of IRL put online vs the curated Online Experience. at a glance data dissemination type shit.
pour one out for the loss of popularized casual html css learning
well you have to understand html css in the hands of people who didnt understand bandwith at all. pages weren't loading, and people were getting lost in the sauce. my myspace was used as a full on zine_ i hosted music videos etc. i was barely there, as A person.
it was fun, though you understand. chaos. i had a whole business making lyts for kids at school. id consult with them at lunch and we'd doodle on a notepad what they wanted their page to look like and id go home and code it.
it was a cultural shift . the blogging aspect of myspace was underutilized and being deplatformed, for the microblog experience. myspace photo contest pages had a huge bubble of chaos and then died. jeffree star became a celebrity. the reason emo music and that scene popped off was largely because myspace music and garage band were a force of fucking NATURE when it came to enabling ANYONE to self publish music.mmyspace sold all of our data and wiped the servers and completely rebranded.
theres no going back once you erase history tbh. i tried to go back and i cant its too painful to sign into somewhere with my 17 year old PFP and no other photos, all my HTML CSS gone, and the DJ MAGIX remix of PUFF STUFF wiped from the face of the earth.justin timberlake tried but unfortunately hes not THAT good
myspace had been lowkey captured by its main audience: people who wanted to be famous on the internet
facebook was a RETVRN to the values of connecting with friends online that built Myspace up to what it was able to grow to be
xanga and livejournal had risen up as Blogging Platforms of Favor so those who wanted to blog went there. StickAm [now dead it was a webcam social network that rebranded as an adult site before going defunct is all so idk wtf youll find] was where people who wanted to be on Live TV went _ the production focused found youtube, and early youtube was a LOT of fun. Klay World if you're interested in silly old claymation.
People were blogging, but in new forms with the rise of twitter / youtube. we went from being WRITE interface as an internet, to being more dimensional. a platform for every thing, an app for every... well. we tried to cram as much of our reality as we could in the first generations. they weren't an extention, they were the every tool. the smartphone was a demon.
twitter was interesting becacuse it was "Talk to the world" at first. the concept of "my tweet broke containment" would have baffled us back in the day. twitter is a microblogging platform where you can talk to the world! people say all sorts of stuff: the great hive mind / library doesn't itself care about what it stores so long as it's storin' . just those who peruse care. it's been interesting to watch twitter evolve into more of a social network type of place than a microblog type of place. now it's calling itself the everything app, a true silo for everything to land and be stored. they are competing with google, which was once the great index of online. now it's just another tv station. you will see what we want you to see and that's not what we were sold. so we're going to try again, and again, and again.
tumblr when it started had heavy crossover with twitter but the two platforms were in HEAVY competition
the way both wound up developing hashtag management bled out to impact the greater internet and how we as people utilize indexing and organizing of stuff
and things on it.
the social landscape has evolved with and around the features that are built to integrate the habits that we built to form the social landscape and i dont know if it's a lanwmower or if we're simply razing it all to the ground on accident.
its cringe to be doing fetish at the park in the same way that "tag your porn" became a phrase we used to bonk eachother with on tumblr and on other social networks back when tagging was how we filtered and curated.
now that hashtags are less of a thing we are reliant on built in filter features that dont seem to function so good but seem to function better than relying on people to... tag their porn.
which has been interesting to watch evolve as we code things smarter to Not Need Them as stuff self indexes with background search features etc
back to stickam, you'd have a video room. youd be the big broadcast, and on the sidebar there were 6 more slots ot host other people. it worked just like a google meet. it also had a chatroom, and a "who is here" list and a "how many is watching" counter
but we used to customize all the things
msn messenger rooms everyone to be honest had their desktop customizations and skin settings made so they experienced how they wanted. skins used to be huge, skins for windows media player i remember making one. it sucked but i made it.
x sold out akin to myspace selling out. bluesky and all the others are cool but are falling to the same fate as microforums: torn apart from the inside out due to social politics people dont know how to handle, parasocial shit, and enmeshment to the point of ruin
facebook emerged as a major player in the crab-i-fication but of how we experience and intake data when it'sable to be templated to intensity
basically if we all have the same data in the same spot its that much easier to learn about one another and navigate socialization with each other optimally
seems to be backfiring, almost as if we aren't Lists. but, this is the vibe of why facebook popped off. people were easily segregating via myspace profile.
we are overcorrecting over and over again.
nobody sits down and learns simple code anymore.
time, too. everything now is instant by design. its so "dont think too much about curating your presence, just fill in these boxes and start yapping / posting. QUICK BEFORE WE LEAVE YOU BEHIND" and thats not the vibe it used to be
interesting that we are encouraged to post-curate in this past little epoch, but now we seem to be returning to the opposite [curation first] but from the perspective of a Brand instead of a Person
meaning you can step onto twitter and design your profile and engage in such a way that you can worm your way into...well, pretty much anywhere, as everyone is here, because if you're not here well then...where the fuck are you?
application interface internet killed the world
like i remember iphones hitting peoples hands and people being like APP and me bieng like "that sounds. so counterproductive. why silo the data instead of building a better tool to make the data make sense" but nah, lets make fuckin' apps
99c on that store times a million bro
1. buttons. i want them the fuck back
2. apps. i want them the fuck gone
3. inspect element? learn?
4. neopets used to teach kids to code. then nickelodeon bought it and then they sold it to ??? china ??? and now nobody can get in their account if they lost it and i heard they did some crypto nft shit and EVERYTHING SUCKS
who is building the internet's rosetta stone oh my god im going to melt
i am in pain and its because discord has been eviscerating me slowly for years. overwhelming lowkey on purpose. once youre in youre in. unsearchable. unindexed. so many questions. so many answers. hidden. eaten. gone. inaccessible.
tragic
they literally psyop you into having a sense of ownership and craving the interface for lil dopamine or whatever pings
remember before emojis we had emoticons
instagram is older than the emoji
twitter evolutions. i can have my twitter profile be "nothing but the evolution of the fart joke" and come into private chats and it becomes discovered that my preferred thing to discuss with other people is "astrophysics".
the profile is performance, brand. the person behind it is the person behind it.
so now it gets interesting because you have people using their profile as their Digital avatar of Who They Are, people using it as A Bit, people using it to study or impact the social landscape, people who see it as a game. All in the same room, assuming the guy next to them is using it similarly. when , are they? case by case
community, ingroup, friendship _ way back somewhere i remember saying that i think a lot of this specific confusion of enmeshment where it might not be appropriate partially stems from linguistic evolution of how we define our relationships here. "moots" sounds way more intimate that "guy i follow for his content who follows me for my content". moots implies someting more. oomfies is endearing and designed to sound endearing.
what are local customs in a place like that? the local is determined by ??? . the only true local determination are private accounts that all follow eachother and have made the social handshake conciously that they are An Ingroup. which is why there is no local and to assume there is one here is imho kinda silly unless youve designated a protocol for local observable by the unfamiliar and acknowledgable on observation only . e/acc created a local. tpot created a local. locals require police, which nobody likes to admit. however we literally just had a massive figurative bank robbery [the warp debacle] and everyone cast themselves in a role in That drama whether they wanted to or not simply by engaging, witnessing, being Around For It . there was no "private" and the creation of private spaces on twitter seriously augmented it