Strangely, I kinda see it being the first thing where "everyone must get into".

Before that, the web was a mishmash of communities, websites, shops and services. Even instant messengers were way more open and utilitarian, and more like Email: I would use Odigo, Adium or whatever, to use ICQ, AOL, etc. And you just talked with your internet friends.

But when MySpace launched, it was a strange situation where you needed an account, otherwise you weren't seen as "cool" by people you knew from non-online spaces. I was in my 20s and in bands, so not having one was just unacceptable.

After that, there would be those "migrations" where "normies" would follow. Using Email, ICQ or AOL wasn't seen as cool, so you should go to MSN. Myspace wasn't cool anymore, so you had to go to Facebook. And so on and so on. Even techies got into it: having a Hotmail instead of Gmail was seen as a bad thing... and so on.

MySpace was notorious for people with social problems who weren't getting out much. Bedroom musicians were able to share tunes and get buzz that they wouldn't have been able to achieve before, since they couldn't manage the in-real-life socialization needed for self-promotion.

I was curious too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harlow#Monkey_studies

> clinging like Harlow's monkey to a simulacrum of togetherness mediated via a screen like we do today

Damn that analogy hits hard.

What people want back is the crazy innovation of getting every one of your friends' updates unless you have intentionally muted them, in chronological order. It was also nice to decorate your page. Made it yours.

Be careful with this site, the footer on each page claims "no tracking" but it's very chatty to it's "engagement" backend with some odd looking numbers included.

  POST https://allthedamn.tools/api/pa/event
  {"n":"pageview","v":36,"u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","d":"allthedamn.tools","r":"https://news.ycombinator.com/"}  
  {"n":"engagement","sd":93,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/","e":32684,"v":36}
  {"n":"engagement","sd":100,"d":"allthedamn.tools","u":"https://allthedamn.tools/myspace-profile-generator/","e":2983,"v":36}

The CloudFlare Insights beacon is enabled too. Redacted the page load IDs and timings.

  POST https://allthedamn.tools/cdn-cgi/rum?
  {"resources":[],"referrer":"https://allthedamn.tools/gif-maker/","eventType":1,"firstPaint":[REDACTED],"firstContentfulPaint":[REDACTED],"startTime":[REDACTED],"versions":{"fl":"2024.11.0","js":"2026.6.0","timings":1},"pageloadId":"[REDACTED]","location":"https://allthedamn.tools/word-counter/","nt":"navigate","timingsV2":{"nextHopProtocol":"h3","transferSize":16584,"decodedBodySize":98788},"dt":"","siteToken":"[REDACTED]","st":2}

The favicon also has an odd cache policy "max-age=0" so if you're clicking within a tool that uses #anchor such as the Time Zone Tool each click with a different #anchor triggers a call to this favicon.

  GET https://allthedamn.tools/favicon.svg
  304 Not Modified
  cache-control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate

And the images too! I've been trying to fill in images for artists big in that time period and it's just sad.

Pages with personality like that are not just examples of how bad UX can be, they are examples of how UX can be used as an artistic form of self-expression.

I miss that quite a lot. For the past 20 years the Web has been a sterile wasteland full of minimalist white and grays and 0 personality.

That's what I miss. Some level of personality is desperately missing from modern alternatives.

True, but it was all quite harmless. Today's perfectly designed web sites are made by folks who know exactly how to make you addicted to the algorithmic feed and whatnot.

Talk to younger people (and not only) today about the way they use the internet. Many of them no longer visit third-party websites at all. They only use walled gardens through dedicated phone apps.

Sure, you can get a website and put whatever you want there. But it simply won't get any meaningful amount of visitors. (By contrast, early-millennium web content was popular enough that real-life subcultures could bond over following the same blogs and other sites.)

Do you think the average person can properly handle security issues and spam? Maybe a static site is fine.

Step 1: Get a website.

it is. the problem is that it doesn't have a marketing budget and big tech that has the biggest ones use it to attack the open web.

[dead]

I can see large amounts of exploits and scams being a thing these days.

it was a show HN once:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25245740

I'm not a regular user atm, when I used it my experience was great, and the owner is a really nice guy. I vaguely remember him scrambling to update on Twitter when the servers where down while he was at uni etc. For a free service that was exploding in users when he was swamped with other stuff, he always did his utmost to fix things ASAP. So yeah, sign up today and buy merch! You may not end up using the site much but it's for a good cause that sparks joy. And while of course there's also spammers or jerks, there are also lots of nice people to be found there.

Facebook (and the other “social media” platforms) are now Memetic Distribution Systems.

Sure. Get mega rich and buy it so you can do whatever you want with it, including shutting it down. Hell, make a GoFundMe for it, see what happens.

It's not for you or me - it's for the AI companies so that they can have "human" content (good luck with that).