Nostalgia for sale? my thoughts on the Myspace revival

There’s been a lot of talk about a potential Myspace revival. The owners (the Vanderhook brothers) confirmed in a new documentary that they still hold the brand and plan to attempt another relaunch. 

​At the risk of sounding like a total buzzkill, I think it’s worth looking at who actually owns it and why this could be happening.

Myspace isn't an independent labour of love, it’s owned by Viant Technology. Viant is an AI-powered ad-tech platform that specializes in data driven advertising and cross-device targeting. They’ll promise us "no algorithms" and "organic music discovery" but a tech firm still runs the servers. When ad companies buy up legacy platforms, they aren't doing it out of love for early-2000s web culture. They do it for data. 

I don't use mainstream social media specifically because of this. We’re used to data farming looking like aggressive targeted ads, personalized algorithms and overt surveillance, the kind of invasive behavioural profiling where every click, scroll time and profile update is commodified to train AI models and extract corporate profit.

But I think we’re about to witness a shift in how our data is harvested. It’s going to look a lot more niche, ambient and lowkey, but we'll still be used to train AI models and there will still be silent behavioural profiling and automated interest mapping under the radar, quietly feeding data systems that manipulate political discourse, shape opinions and nudge our behaviour without us even realizing it.

​So understandably, a lot of people are burnt out on modern social media. They are exhausted by doom scrolling, forced engagement algorithms and feeds engineered to destroy attention spans or manipulate us. Naturally, people think of the older internet, a place that felt quiet, creative and genuinely connected without an algorithm dictating what we saw. We all feel a longing for connection, a space that feels like ours, we're tired of feeling like the product.

​Corporations realize we're nostalgic for that era and they are not about to accept the defeat of modern social media. Their strategy is simple: wrap an ad-tech backend in nostalgic late-2000s branding, sell us back our own childhood internet memories, and continue farming our personal data under the guise of "bringing back what we used to love."

​My biggest worry is that brand recognition for Myspace alone will pull people away from indie, privacy-conscious spaces like Friendrewind or Spacehey.

​Places like this exist because creators and users built them to escape data farming and modern social media. They give us back profile customization and actual community control without corporate surveillance or hidden tracking scripts.

​Because Myspace is the original platform, the hype will inevitably attract people. At first I was pretty excited too. It’s frustrating to think that people who care about privacy and authentic web culture might get drawn back into a corporate data farm just because it carries a familiar name, leaving behind platforms such as this.

​I know a lot of people have reached the point of apathy, the feeling that our privacy is already compromised, so why bother fighting it? especially if they get a fun platform out of the deal, but that learned helplessness is exactly what corporations rely on. Giving up on privacy just because it’s hard doesn't make surveillance okay and accepting data exploitation as the tax for human connection is a false compromise. We don't have to trade our autonomy just to have a personal space on the web.

​So what are your thoughts? will you move over to Myspace or do you believe indie, privacy-focused platforms will stay strong as the genuine alternative to corporate social media?