Pretty Pointless
MySpace is coming back. Justin Timberlake of all people is the one steering this thing. The screenshots are incredible—I’m not even kidding, the interface is sleek, the timelines are clean, the whole thing looks like something designed by someone who actually understood what’s wrong with every other social network. Which is exactly the problem.
The old MySpace was never beautiful. It was a disaster—loud, chaotic, full of broken HTML and autoplay music and comment spam and actual predators in your inbox. People customized their pages obsessively, made them completely unusable to anyone but themselves. The whole thing was garbage. But somehow that’s exactly what made it work. It was honest. It didn’t pretend to be curated or algorithmic or safe. You went there to be seen, to find your people, to be weird without apologizing for it.
What gets me about remembering MySpace is how much I hated it while I was using it. I knew the platform was full of creeps and bots. I knew my painstakingly designed profile page looked ridiculous to anyone looking at it. I knew I was wasting time. And still I couldn’t stop. Tom was your first friend, always there, always smiling.
It died the way most things do online—suddenly and then forgotten. Facebook ate it. Everyone moved on. MySpace became a punch line, the story older siblings told to explain how fragile everything is, how quickly what seems permanent becomes ruins.
But now it’s back. The new design doesn’t look like the old one at all. It’s slick, contemporary, actually functional. It’s the version of MySpace that maybe should have existed all along, except now we’re so tired of social networks that the promise of a beautiful interface doesn’t even matter anymore.
We’re drowning in them—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Discord, whatever new thing launched last week. There’s no room left for another place to pour yourself into.
Except the design is really, genuinely good. That’s the seduction. That’s why this might actually work for some people—the ones young enough not to remember MySpace the first time, the ones for whom this is just another social network without any weight of disappointment behind it. For them it’s clean and new. For me it’s a ghost with better graphics.
Gorgeous garbage still doesn’t make the garbage necessary. We don’t need another timeline to check, another feed to scroll through, another algorithm deciding who sees what we post. MySpace was a beautiful failure once. I’m betting it stays that way.