MySpace Grew Up

The new MySpace is boring, which might be the worst possible outcome.

I spent years tearing into it. The design was a nightmare—cluttered, counterintuitive, held together with corporate indifference. Customize your profile and you’d get something that looked like a 2005 geocities page that had lost a fight with Comic Sans. It was terrible, and I loved complaining about it.

Then they redesigned and made it clean. Normal. Like every other social network—minimal, professional, the kind of thing a brand manager wouldn’t flinch at. ’Live your life with MySpace.’ They sanded away anything that felt like personality.

What’s weird is I actually miss it now. MySpace was reliably ridiculous in a way that felt personal. You could taste the dysfunction in the interface. Now it’s competent, and I can’t even summon the energy to criticize anymore, which might be the only honest thing you could say about a social network.