Ummm… when he sold MySpace he literally sold our data to NewsCorp?
Memes never lie!
Hello, cyber police? Yeah, this person is lying on the information super highway!
“Oh, they done goof’d! Thanks for reporting this. We’re going to backtrace them immediately.”
Are you gonna hack their IP and spoof their firewall so you can bypass the defense algorithms?
I’m gonna need another hackerman on this keyboard I’m using if I’m gonna pull off a hack that crazy!
Whaaaat TIL
In 2005, two years after launching the site, Anderson and DeWolfe sold Myspace to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. for $580 million. Afterward, Anderson continued working as the company’s president. He retired from active involvement with Myspace in 2009 or 2010 as its popularity waned and Facebook usurped it as the most popular social networking site.
He then went to burning man and traveled and got into travel photography. Lives between Hawaii, LA, and vegas
it cost 'em $580 million… they got back, six years later, a whole $35 million when they unloaded it.
The data and connections were what’s important, algorithms need data, and that was as true back then as it is now.
I remember when NewsCorp bought MySpace and I was already on Facebook at the time. I knew that NewsCorp had been taken for suckers because it was plain as day that young people would all move to Facebook.
Of course, I no longer use Facebook, but it’s a lesson for business people. If you’re making an investment in something young people use, maybe ask young people something about it first.
As you get older, you really just lose touch with that kind of thing, so it’s understandable how a bunch of suits missed that and flushed half a billion dollars down the toilet.
The data they got continued to be valuable to advertisers for decades
Also MySpace was one of the first platforms to use a built-in targeted advertising model, and partnered with Google for both adserve, indexing, and search. To say they didnt sell data is the same as saying Facebook doesn’t sell data, they were the data user, selling ad space based on profiling users.
Revisionist bullshit. Despite what came later, Facebook was the privacy-respecting alternative to MySpace at the time.
How was the “dumb fucks” platform ever privacy-respecting? The shit came out later, but it was always a privacy nightmare since the farmville days and even as “The Facebook”
edit: I just read another comment about the Google adserve partnership, didn’t know that, guess I see your angle now. But still, it was only surface appearance of privacy, behind the scenes the Zucc has always been the same and doing their own tracking instead of partnering with someone else
I don’t know why are you so angry with poor Zucc. He just wanted to oogle his classmate’s bathsuit pics, isn’t that relatable?
My how things changed!
My memory of MySpace was creating over 2 dozen accounts and maxing out the Playlists.just a bunch of my favorite albums uploaded, as my friends ‘private’ music server.
Bullshit. Facebook asked for my real name and school email to sign up.
I don’t know that Facebook ever sold itself that way. It was privacy respecting perhaps only because it only allowed college students to sign up for it, so only your classmates could see what you were doing. However, shortly after launching Zuck came out with the news feed, which told everyone whenever you looked at their profile. People hated this! The news feed in general felt like a huge privacy violation and Zuck issued his first apology. Still, they kept the news feed.
Soon they also allowed photo sharing and this is how everyone got into trouble though, as people posted photos of themselves partying and then their friends tagged them in those photos and then a couple years later, Facebook let everyone’s parents in and by that point people were trying to get jobs. It quickly became clear that maybe sharing everything on Facebook wasn’t a good idea.
Zuck promised flat out that there wouldn’t be any spying or surveillance, ever. That turned out to be a massive lie, of course (just as when Page & Brin told us in 1998 that they believed advertising was incompatible with search), but it was a big part of the draw of the early Facebook that you (seemingly) didn’t have to choose between your friends and getting spied on by Rupert Murdoch & Co over at Myspace.
He even made friends with all of us.
Fucking legend!
I’m legit jelly.
first thing you were forced to look at. got worse;
.
Yeah let’s spread misinformation and romanticize the past so we can blame our problems on bad actors and bad times rather than recognize and address the systemic causes that have pervaded social media since its inception.
sorry for being so salty and sarcastic, in a weird mood rn
Systems are made of people. So yeah, remove the bad actors and you already have a better system.
Fair point. My rebuttal: The system here is manifold, a lack of general awareness and understanding, the legislative framework in most places, and most importantly, capitalism. The owners of social media are the most replaceable part of that, if Meta and Zuck imploded today, some other for-profit crap would fill the void
Are the people running modern social media not part of the system?
Valid question but IMO, no. replacing Zuckerberg Musk etc would do nothing to solve the fact that capitalism runs social media as a for-profit enterprise
remember watching early ad spam and people saying, ‘enjoy internet now because the advertisers are going to ruin it’. yep
I’m jealous i was not computer literate enough when myspace was big, all i did back then was play flash games and watch smosh
myspace is where I started to learn html. there is a fan recreation website called spacehey that’s like old-school myspace.
I appreciate him but MySpace definitely did collect data. Props to him for his photographer career and doing his own thing though
