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Comment by naravara | Hacker News Reader

When I started using Facebook it wasn't a newsfeed, it was just a personal homepage with a photo album and a bulletin board attached.

I'd love to have something like that again that everyone uses, but everything is about goosing the influencer economy now rather than letting me socialize.

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I'd love it if Meetup had a threaded discussion board with a way to pin photos and video. All my social networks would use it.

That's actually what Google+ was with circles before the morons in charge forcibly bundled it into Youtube and killed it. Google should have had some patience like the people over at Musical.ly and built an audience organically rather than shoving unwanted garbage down our throats.

You're basically describing myspace.

I honestly liked MySpace. I think it was superior to Facebook in every way. At least you could enjoy some cool music on someone’s page when you visited it. The page was about them.

Remember how you could customize the css on your myspace? That would be unthinkable nowadays.

Yes it was less of a 'database' with a front end but more of a messy creative space you could put whatever you like on.

Then follow me on SpaceHey, MySpace reborn.

https://spacehey.com/josh

That's basically what Facebook was (though really it drew more from Friendster). As I remember it, the big appeal of Facebook over MySpace was that the interface was clean and that people felt like migrating from MySpace to The Facebook was a way of shedding their high school selves and reinventing how they presented themselves for college. So it was still loose but looked a bit more "adult." But they very much were viewed as doing the same thing.

It almost sounds as if there is a niche for that!

BTW have you tried dreamwidth.org, a fork of the venerable livejournal.com? They look as if 2005 had never ended,in a good sense.

There isn't. Many companies e.g. Path, Google have tried and failed to build a social network that focused on more personal relationships.

They simply don't offer enough value over say a WhatApp group.

I think they wanted hockey-stick growth and prospects of a big payout, while the sustainable model may be a lifestyle business that barely pays for itself.

This. Though I'm not even sure about the "barely pays for itself." I mean, Automaticc/Wordpress sustains itself okay and had the resources to buy Tumblr. I think they're just under $100M in annual revenue. Outside the world of absurd Silicon Valley valuations, that would be considered very respectable

I remember the introduction of the News Feed and how creepy and invasive it felt at the time. Here’s all the interactions you previously had to look for explicitly, now pushed in front of you. It was a harbinger of things to come.

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