MySpace is still alive but it's nothing like it was 15 years ago
Culture
[MUSIC]
For my Myspace, username was korianboi64.
My Myspace name was drpetervenkman.
It was gnarlyariel.
[LAUGH]
My Myspace username was thecamouflagechameleon.
My first account was my personal one, it was danackermannyc.
Cuz someone else got their first thing got regular Danackerman.
And I was friends with all these older, cooks and stuff that I worked with and they'd all be like, what's up chameleon?
[LAUGH]
And then later on they moved to much more music oriented platforms.
I made a second account, danackermanmuscic where I uploaded all kinds of music from different albums and stuff I worked on.
My Myspace user name.
I don't even want to tell you what it was.
[LAUGH]
[MUSIC]
The top 8 of my friends was so important and it felt like such a big deal to be in someones top 8. You always felt like you had to reciprocate the feeling right.
Like if your best friend put you as their number 1, you had to put them at least at number Three, two or one.
Not only is like isolating eight of your friends or your family members like kind of messed up, but then there was like ranking within the top 8.>>I do remember that one of them was a girl I had a crush on, and that would It will, I thought it was a subtle message to them, that hey, you're in my top eight, and I'm interested in you kind of thing.
It's lame if Tom is in your top eight, you know like, this person's not a serious user.
Messed up in my head, that I evaluated all my friendships and put one before the other.
And it was like this thing, and it was obvious.
And I think that's what.
I think that's what everyone did.
Hell yeah I decorated my Myspace page, it was very clashy.
That was a big mistake.
They shouldn't of let people do that.
I just remember everyone had these wild pages with blinky things and flashy things and everything was so seizure inducing, and I took it as a point to pride.
To keep my page very mellow, very sedate.
Designing your own page was a really big deal, if you knew how.
MySpace was where I actually learned HTML, learned what it was and what you could do with it.
I would go on to different people's MySpace
Steal their codes.
And then you can put that into your peg and then kind of modify it.
Or I would go on Google and look for MySpace theme codes.
And you can go and copy and paste these certain codes.
You had to drill down into the HTML, and you could code your own page up.
It was the first time I remember ever looking at the Internet and being like, everything on the Intnernet is just a big word puzzle.
I can figure this out.
[LAUGH]
It made me realize, wow, this is actually so much easier to put stuff together.
[MUSIC]
Man, I Maybe, I don't remember like a lot of what the hell you did on MySpace, it was way more like a lurk game I feel like.
I think I mostly posted some photos and looked at some of my friends photos, a very early version of photo sharing.
Obviously music stuff became a big part of it.
That was the main thing, we weren't really posting links back them so much.
As simply making an outpost for other people to come and see.
A lot of my friends follow bands, but somebody that I particularly remember was Tila Tequila.
Because she was a Vietnamese American, and she was a car model then.
And a lot of my guy friends had her on their Top 8, which is like, kind of cringey on their part.
And then I was just like, who is she?
I was super infatuated with her.
But now she's a neo-Nazi.
And a white supremacist.
So we don't talk about [UNKNOWN] any more.
Sounds just like the internet today?
Yeah.
[LAUGH]
You know, you didn't have push notifications or anything, and people could just post whatever they wanted to.
So I remember I had some friends that were really crude, and would Like over night they would post some like obscene image or something on my profile.
And I'd have to like check in the morning and go like delete it.
Cuz it was like so gross.
Me and my friends' garage band put music on there.
What, you put your own music on MySpace?
Yeah, yeah.
That's cool.
I didn't know that.
Was it good music?
I mean probably not.
But we put it out there.
I think that's It's all that matters.
[MUSIC]
So I moved from Chicago when I was a little boy and I had an extended family that I left.
And many years later, they were trying to look for me on there end.
And back then Myspace was the only social platform that you can actually go through and find people right?
And my name is John Kim, so I'm sure there was a billion John Kim's in the world.
And somehow they were able to look for me on MySpace, and connect with me.
This whole reunion happened after, through MySpace.
I just remember like even in 2004 or whenever it was I was like at the most I was ever into it I just constantly remember being like, "This site feels unfinished." And I just remember thinking like, "This is very ugly even for 2004 on the Internet." I just remember that, so yeah, that's all I remember about Myspace.
I'm glad it's over.