The Fabled Return Of MySpace: Are We Romanticising Life Before Algorithms?

Take yourself back to 2008. You’re young, Ed Hardy is the pinnacle of cool and phones still have buttons.

It was a different time, a different world, and our social lives existed almost entirely in real life. My goodness, imagine that! It’s tough to picture now, but having a proper conversation with somebody required close physical proximity and making phone calls was not only expensive, but it was an occasion, too.

And then there was MySpace. The earliest rendition of the social media platforms we’ve become so accustomed to today. But with one important distinction: no algorithms. Everything was light, real and untainted by manufactured ranking systems that influenced exactly what we saw and the order in which we saw it. It was just more real.

Well, that’s the way it’s being portrayed these days – like a long-forgotten Eden of sorts that allowed for wholesome online engagement, unlike the dark and twisted social media platforms we’re so dependent on today.

But, to believe this is to give power to a false dichotomy, and this kind of polarisation of past versus future often is. It’s so much easier to remember the past as better and brighter than the present, allowing for a deep yearning of what used to be. However, we’re creating a false memory of sorts.

Someone, somewhere (or perhaps many people everywhere) is reading these posts and headlines about how young people want a MySpace comeback because they’re all for “a world free of algorithms” and thinking, “what?” What do you mean no algorithms? Of course MySpace used algorithms! They certainly weren’t the same as the ones we’re beholden to today, but they still existed and influenced what we saw, who we mixed with and our perceptions of those around us.

The world we’re looking back on is mostly one we’ve made up. So what’s really going on here, what are people actually yearning for and how can we satiate this growing desire?

Romanticising the Early 2000s Is a Convenient Fantasy

Nostalgia has a funny way of sanding down the rough edges and applying fresh coat of sparkly new paint. The older something gets, the better it seems. The music was better, the television was better, pople were friendlier and life was simpler. And the internet, apparently, was healthier.

But when people talk about bringing back MySpace, I don’t think they’re actually talking about MySpace. They’re talking about a version of the internet that existed before social media became an industry.

Back then, most of us weren’t creators and humans didn’t have “personal brands” (apart from mega celebrities like Kim Kardashian or Michael Jordan). We weren’t optimising engagement or analysing impressions, and we weren’t being fed an endless stream of content by systems designed to keep us online for as long as possible. We logged on, checked what our friends were doing (our friends, not celebs), customised our profile with some truly dreadful HTML and logged off again.

The internet felt smaller because it was smaller. As James Weiss points out, “MySpace may have been simpler but the internet was also very small back then.” Social media platforms weren’t dealing with billions of users, millions of creators and an endless flood of content competing for attention. They simply didn’t need to solve the same problems.

That’s why the idea of a completely algorithm-free social network sounds appealing in theory but falls apart the moment you think about it for more than a few minutes (if that).

Algorithms Aren’t the Enemy

When people say they want to get rid of algorithms, what they’re often expressing is frustration, alongisde a general misunderstanding of what an algorithm actually is in the first place.

They’re tired of feeling manipulated, and they’re tired of seeing the same content over and over again. They’re tired of feeds that seem designed to maximise engagement rather than enjoyment, and they’ree over being stuck in endless loops of confirmation bias.

As Derek Iwasiuk notes, “What seems to be making people tired is not the algorithm but bad algorithms.” And while that’s almost certainly what users are actually complaining about, it’s a very different point.

After all, algorithms are everywhere. They power search engines, streaming services and online shops. Hell, most of us rely on algorithmic sorting dozens of times a day without giving it a second thought. In fact, even MySpace – good old pure, “wholesome” MySpace – used algorithms to sort things like “Top Friends” lists, profile searchs and friend suggestions. These algorithms are just quite different to the ones we’re seeing now. And perhaps more importantly, we now know that algorithms exist and how they affect us – not completely (clearly), but enough to dislike them.

Indeed, the difference between now and then is that social media algorithms have become increasingly opaque. People often don’t know why they’re seeing something, why they’re not seeing something else or why their feeds suddenly seem filled with content from complete strangers. So they blame “the algorithm”.

But the issue isn’t necessarily the existence of algorithms. It’s specific types of algorithms and the growing feeling that we’ve lost control over them.

Would A Chronological Feed Actually Be Better?

So, what are people actually asking for? After all, if we’re saying we no longer want social media platforms ruled by algorithms, that must mean the alternative would be a platform that doesn’t use algorithms at all. And while many are equating that fantasy to MySpace, it actually doesn’t exist. Well, not in the way we would want it to and not in a way that would make people want to use it for more than a few minutes.

One of the most common arguments made by the “anti-algorithm” crowd is that platforms should simply return to chronological feeds. Show people posts in the order they’re published. Problem solved, right?

Except it isn’t. As Will Mitchell points out, “A chronological feed is still a ranking system.”

And that’s actually the important part that many people miss. Chronological feeds don’t eliminate bias, they simply replace one set of priorities with another. Instead of prioritising relevance, they prioritise recency. Instead of amplifying content a platform thinks you’ll like, they amplify the people who post most frequently. That means that the loudest voices still rise to the top, and the people with the most time still dominate the conversation.

It’s definitely not necessarily more democratic; it’s just a different set of rules. And let’s be honest, there are good reasons why we chose to move on from this mode and method – generally speaking, it’s kind of boring, and it’s simply not what we want to see. And conversely, it also means we’ll miss things we do want to see because we simply weren’t checking our phones at the right time.

What Do the People Really Want?

If the growing nostalgia for MySpace isn’t really about MySpace, then what is it about? I’d hedge a guess and say control. Or perhaps more accurately, the feeling of control – a type of control they never really had, but creates a nice memory to look back on.

James Weiss argues that users don’t actually want a world without algorithms. They want “to feel like they have more control over what they see.” And while I don’t particularly like asserting that I know better about what people want than they do, I really do feel like there’s a base level of misunderstanding here.

People want to decide whether they see a chronological feed or a personalised one, and they want to understand why content is being recommended. They want to be able to tweak the system rather than simply being subjected to it, and they don’t want to feel trapped in its infinite loops.

Ironically, the future people seem to be asking for isn’t a return to 2008 at all, because they’re looking for a world that doesn’t really exist (and they don’t really want to live in). Rather, they’re frustrated witht the status quo, and what they’re really yearning for is platforms that are transparent enough to let users choose how their feeds work (at least a little more than they do now).

And that brings us back to MySpace. Reports suggest the platform is preparing yet another relaunch – in fact, Tim and Chris Vanderhoek (co-founders of Viant Technology, underwhich MySpace is a subsidiary) recently asserted that they were planning on relaunching MySpace, it was more of a decision about when. And the planned relaunch is undoubtedly being further fueled by this growing wave of discontent with current social media platforms.

But if history is anything to go by, unless they make other significant changes to the platform to make it more interesting, the MySpace relaunch will most likely generate a burst of excitement, a wave of nostalgic headlines and plenty of social media posts from people claiming they’re ready to go back. And people will ditch Instagram and TikTok (well, delete the apps from their phones), go back to MySpace and grow bored within five minutes. Only to redownload Insta and TikTok and return to business as usual, while MySpace is, once again, left to fade away into obscurity.

And while this may sound overly negative and perhaps a little bit dramatic, it’s not meant to be a dig at MySpace at all. It was a fabulous platform that served an important purpose back in its hayday. But that was a different time, and what’s happening right now actually has nothing to do with MySpace at all.

Users are being driven towards a false memory wearing a MySpace mask, and in reality, they’re not running towards anything at all – they’re running away from what they’ve loosely dubbed “the algorithm”.

And “the algorithm” isn’t Instagram, TikTok, X or even Facebook. It’s a reflection of the cultural climate in which we find ourselves today and the growing (festering!) frustration of having access to everything and control over nothing all at once.

I wish it was, but MySpace isn’t the solution. Just like “the algorithm” itself isn’t the problem.