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Comment by asdfman123 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like Myspace really messed up at some point. Sure, Facebook beat it out by, in my opinion, just being a better website, but Myspace could have clung to users in the mid-to-late aughts by remaining a great place to discover music.

It used to be great for that. You used Facebook to do your normal social networking, and still had a Myspace account so you could go down the rabbit hole of discovering bands from the local to the international level.

What happened to it? I don't even remember. They should have shaped it into a music-oriented social network. If they invested a lot of money into it, maybe they could draw people back from Facebook and even compete with them.

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The final nail in the coffin for myspace was when they changed the way bands were allowed to list shows, and at the same time deleted previous show history.

Myspace is the only time on the internet there was a standard place to list shows that everyone was onboard with. The reason was because it was so easy to do so. Except for the date, city and genre all the fields were just text and you could put whatever you wanted. This meant that even bass players could figure out how to list a show.

When facebook first got the clear lead, most people still signed onto myspace at least once a week, especially everyone I knew in a band. The minute they made the change, they all stopped.

I always thought MySpace ruined itself by allowing so much customization.

Too many people I knew had profiles with white text on a yellow background and autoplaying music. It was just horrible visiting their profiles.

>I always thought MySpace ruined itself by allowing so much customization.

I've always viewed this as MySpace's top feature and the direction away from this is why MySpace failed. The name even implied it was a users space of personal creation. Tumblr sort-of did well with similar ideas, but to a lesser extent.

Absolutely! What this allowed to flourish was also an organic eco-system of sites dedicated to customization's followed by the great widget movement and lead to companies like PageFlakes and SplashCast. MySpace was a highly influential driver to the today's internet.

It was a great feature that could have been awesome. Instead they basically allowed any CSS a user could imagine and it just made clicking a MySpace not worth doing.

MySpace failed to scale with their user base and the site at its peak became horribly slow and felt broken. They didn't get good technical folks to fix the architecture in time, and then combined with the failure to innovate and add more "addictive" features such as a news feed ultimately led it to die a slow death.

IIRC they tried exactly what you said

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