Myspace: What’s Old May Be New Again, and Why It Just Might Be the Right Time
- The White Hatter
- 4 minutes ago
- 8 min read
For parents and caregivers who were online during the early 2000s, the name Myspace will probably trigger a mixture of nostalgia and memories of a very different internet. There were customized profile pages, music that sometimes started playing the moment you opened someone’s profile, photographs, blogs, friends, and, of course, the infamous “Top 8” that put your social circle front and centre. It was colourful, sometimes chaotic, and certainly wasn’t without its problems. However, compared with today’s social media environment, there was something fundamentally different about how people generally experienced it.
Myspace was largely a place you went to see people, music, interests, and communities you had intentionally chosen to connect with. Today’s social media environment increasingly works in the opposite direction.
Open TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, or many other large platforms today and much of what appears on the screen isn’t necessarily there because you deliberately asked to see it. Recommendation algorithms increasingly decide what appears next based upon what they predict will capture your attention. The social graph, meaning the people we intentionally choose to connect with, has increasingly been supplemented, and sometimes displaced, by the interest graph, where platforms continually recommend content from people and accounts we have never met and may never have chosen to follow.
Now artificial intelligence is adding another ingredient to this transformation. We are increasingly hearing from youth and teens we speak with that they are becoming tired of what they describe as feeds filled with AI generated “slop,” repetitive content, algorithmically promoted videos, influencers, advertising, rage bait, engagement bait, and material that sometimes feels as though it was manufactured primarily to generate another view rather than to communicate something meaningful. This is one reason why recent news surrounding the possible return of Myspace caught our attention.
First, an important clarification. Myspace did not technically vanish from the internet. Myspace still exists today, although it is a very different and much smaller service than the social networking giant many parents may remember. Its present site is heavily oriented toward music, artists, entertainment, videos, and discovery (1).
What is interesting is that Myspace’s current owners, Chris and Tim Vanderhook, have recently indicated that they intend to relaunch the platform (2). There is no firm public timeline yet, and this certainly does not mean that Myspace is suddenly about to become the next TikTok. Previous attempts to revive the platform have struggled, and its owners have acknowledged investing heavily in earlier efforts without restoring Myspace to anything resembling its former prominence.
However, the timing is interesting. Perhaps the more important story isn’t whether Myspace itself succeeds, perhaps the more important story is why something like Myspace might suddenly make sense again.
We have written previously about an interesting shift we are seeing among some youth and teens (3)(4). Many young people still use the major social platforms, but increasingly their meaningful social interactions appear to be moving elsewhere.
The public facing feed might be where they watch videos, follow creators, discover memes, or consume entertainment. Their actual friendships, however, can increasingly live inside smaller group chats, private Discord servers, gaming communities, messaging apps, private accounts, and other intentionally created digital spaces. In other words, there appears to be a growing distinction between where young people consume content and where they actually socialize, and this matters.
The original promise of social media was largely contained in the name itself, “social media”. You joined because your friends were there. You followed people you knew or wanted to know. You posted something and people within your network saw it. Your online environment was not influenced by algorithms, but the people you intentionally connected with remained much more central to the experience.
Today, increasingly, the platform itself chooses much of what we see. A teenager can open an app intending to see what their friends are doing and quickly find themselves watching an endless succession of videos created by strangers, influencers, companies, content farms, and increasingly artificial intelligence.
That isn’t necessarily bad. Recommendation algorithms can help young people discover incredible musicians, artists, educators, communities, hobbies, ideas, and opportunities they never would have encountered otherwise. The problem occurs when discovery begins replacing connection.
Artificial intelligence is accelerating another change that we believe parents should understand. Creating online content once required at least some human effort. Someone generally had to write the article, draw the picture, record the song, photograph the event, film the video, or create the meme. Generative AI dramatically reduces that barrier.
One person can now generate enormous quantities of photographs, videos, voices, music, articles, comments, and other material relatively quickly. As AI generated video becomes more convincing and automated content production systems become more sophisticated, the amount of synthetic material competing for our attention will likely continue to grow.
This is where the phrase “AI slop” has entered the online vocabulary. It generally describes low quality, mass produced AI generated material created primarily to attract clicks, views, engagement, or advertising revenue rather than to offer meaningful creative or informational value.
For young people navigating these environments, there can be another consequence. The internet can begin to feel less human. When you don’t know whether the photograph is real, whether the influencer is real, whether the voice is real, whether the comment was written by a person, or whether the video was generated primarily because an algorithm predicted you would watch it, authentic human connection can become increasingly valuable.
Ironically, artificial intelligence may therefore help create demand for something that looks remarkably similar to an earlier version of social networking. This is where the possibility of a Myspace revival becomes fascinating to us.
Myspace would be making a mistake, in our opinion, if it simply attempted to become another TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube. Those platforms already exist, have enormous user bases, sophisticated recommendation systems, established creator economies, and extraordinary technological resources.
However, what if Myspace went backwards in order to move forward?
Imagine a social network where the primary experience wasn’t an endless algorithmically generated “For You” feed, but rather a space centred around people you intentionally chose to connect with.
Imagine young people having greater control over what their profiles looked like again.
Imagine music, creativity, photographs, interests, friendships, communities, and personal expression becoming more important than chasing algorithmic visibility.
Imagine opening a social platform and primarily seeing what your friends created rather than what an algorithm calculated was most likely to keep you scrolling.
Interestingly, this broader desire appears to extend beyond Myspace nostalgia. There is a growing interest, particularly among younger users, where there is an appetite in smaller, more authentic and community oriented online environments rather than highly polished, performance driven social feeds.
Perhaps one of the next big trends in social media won’t actually be something new. Perhaps it will be rediscovering what “social” was supposed to mean in the first place.
There is another reason parents and caregivers shouldn’t dismiss this possibility simply as nostalgia, because most teenagers today have no meaningful memory of Myspace.
A 15-year-old in 2026 was born around 2010 or 2011, years after Myspace’s cultural peak. To them, customizable profiles, friend centred feeds, music focused identity, and deliberately constructed social circles might not feel retro at all, they could actually feel new.
We have seen this phenomenon elsewhere. Technologies, fashions, music formats, cameras, clothing styles, and cultural trends frequently cycle between generations. What one generation considers outdated can become interesting precisely because the next generation didn’t experience it the first time. The same could potentially happen with social networking. What Millennials remember as “old social media” might be experienced by today’s teenagers as an alternative to algorithmically saturated media.
Yes, old Myspace had plenty of problems. There were concerns involving privacy, inappropriate content, bullying, unwanted contact, sexualized content, predators, oversharing, and young people connecting with people they didn’t actually know.
Changing the architecture of a social network does not eliminate human behaviour.
A relaunched Myspace, or any platform built around smaller social circles, would still require thoughtful privacy settings, effective reporting and blocking systems, age appropriate protections, strong moderation, transparent data practices, protections against unwanted adult contact, and meaningful safety-by-design.
There would also be important questions about artificial intelligence. Would MySpace allow user photographs, music, writing, videos, voices, or other content be used to develop or improve AI systems? Would AI-generated accounts be permitted? Would synthetic content be labelled? Would recommendation algorithms still determine visibility? Would advertising dominate the experience? Would users be able to choose a genuinely chronological or friend-centred feed? These questions may ultimately matter more than whether the platform happens to be called Myspace. Our recommendation to MySpace, stay away from using AI for commercialization.
For parents and caregivers, perhaps the biggest lesson here isn’t that everyone should prepare for their teenager to suddenly open a Myspace account. We aren’t predicting that. Instead, we believe parents and caregivers should pay attention to the direction of travel youth and teens are taking today.
Young people have always adapted their digital environments to meet their social needs. When one space becomes too public, too commercialized, too adult dominated, too algorithmic, or simply uncool, they often move somewhere else.
Right now, we are hearing from youth who appear increasingly interested in smaller, more intentional digital communities where they can interact with people they actually know or share genuine interests with such as on Discord, gaming communities, private group chats, and emerging social platforms that maybe a rebranded MySpace could fit into. The specific platform matters less than understanding why young people might be attracted to it.
For years, much of social media has operated within what is commonly called the “attention economy.” Human attention has enormous commercial value, so platforms have become exceptionally good at predicting what will keep people watching, clicking, scrolling, commenting, and returning. Generative AI could supercharge that model because content itself can now increasingly be produced at enormous scale. However, there may eventually be a point of diminishing returns such as when:
Content becomes infinite, authenticity becomes scarce.
Artificial content becomes inexpensive, human-created content becomes valuable.
Everyone can generate something, knowing who actually created something matters more.
Algorithms can endlessly entertain us, choosing who we spend our time with may become more meaningful.
This is why we believe the potential return of Myspace is more interesting than simply another nostalgic technology story, it may represent something larger that is happening online specific to where youth and teens are starting to migrate to.
Parents and caregivers don’t need to chase every new platform their child discovers. In fact, trying to keep an encyclopedic knowledge of every app young people use is becoming increasingly unrealistic. Instead, talk with your child about the type of digital environment they prefer:
Ask them whether they still enjoy the large social platforms.
Ask what they think about AI-generated content appearing in their feeds.
Ask whether they spend more time talking with friends privately than posting publicly.
Ask whether they trust what they see online.
Ask whether social media still feels social to them.
Their answers may tell us considerably more about the future of social media than another industry prediction ever could.
We also believe this is where parents and caregivers can shift the conversation away from simply asking, “What app are you using?” toward the much more useful question, “What are you doing there, who are you doing it with, and what do you like about that space?” Those questions travel across platforms.
We don’t know whether Myspace will successfully return as a major social network, nobody does. Its owners have expressed an intention to relaunch it, but intention and cultural relevance are two very different things.
However, we believe the conversation surrounding its possible return deserves attention. For nearly two decades, social media platforms have been competing to build increasingly sophisticated systems capable of predicting what people will watch next. Young people are beginning to want something different. Not another algorithm trying to understand them, not another endless feed filled with strangers, not another flood of AI generated content competing for their attention. They simply want somewhere online to hang out with their friends. If that is where social networking begins moving next, then perhaps Myspace wasn’t such an outdated idea after all. Sometimes what’s old really can become new again.
The bigger question isn’t whether today’s teenagers will embrace the Myspace their parents remember. It’s whether someone will build the kind of human centred social space that Myspace, at its best, once represented.
Digital Food For Thought
The White Hatter
Facts Not Fear, Facts Not Emotions, Enlighten Not Frighten, Know Tech Not No Tech
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