[SV_BubbleTime]

You don’t seem to understand. It isn’t about me. Or even people like me. Slowly they kill themselves. It might not even be obvious to people, but they’ll slowly turn away at this or the next thing or the next one after that.

I’ll be here long after Reddit at this rate.

MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it. Does anyone think Reddit is the shit in 2026? And that is without anything put next to it.

[inigyou]

Now Facebook is worse than MySpace ever was. A tech company dying has little to do with the quality of the product. Remember, enshittification brings in more money, not less.

[rmunn]

The word "the" is doing a lot of work in your last paragraph. I initially missed seeing the word "the", and that changed the meaning entirely for me. Observe:

> MySpace seemed like shit until you put Facebook next to it.

This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

> MySpace seemed like the shit until you put Facebook next to it.

What you actually wrote claimed that MySpace seemed great, but then Facebook was even better. Which makes it easy to explain why people jumped ship.

I don't have an actual point to make about MySpace or Facebook. (I never used MySpace, and only used Facebook once, two decades ago, because the social group I was in at the time was using Facebook as their only means of announcing events — once I moved to a different town I dropped Facebook and closed my account). I just wanted to comment about the grammatical structure of that sentence, because I thought it was fascinating. The word "the" is so often mere filler, which could be omitted and the sentence would still be perfectly understandable. (Hence why many languages, such as Russian, don't have the word "the" at all). But here's a counterexample to that general rule, a sentence where omitting one since instance of the word "the" inverted the meaning.

[chrisweekly]

Yes! You're gonna love Ismo (the Finnish standup who pokes fun at quirks of the English language). This bit^1 on the word "shit" was the first I saw of him online. I've since seen him live and, I guess if you know, you know. Genius.

1. https://youtu.be/ifNEgwGACEQ?is=cJHqXIkZVqgmt4iO

[prmoustache]

> This sentence would be claiming that MySpace was a lousy experience, but Facebook was even worse. Which would make it hard to explain why people jumped ship.

I think original[1] Facebook UX was probably fine and clear enough for anyone but I would say that most people didn't jump ship: their first social media use started with facebook. And that was because FB grew bigger and faster, not because people were migrating from Myspace. Myspace has only been mostly limited to teenagers and a small fraction of music artists. Growth just slowed earlier because it never attracted many adults. It grew when people didn't have a smartphone and were not terminally online yet. It was a niche.

The main difference was the paradigm/mental imagery. Myspace was about opening the door to your teenager bedroom with all the posters on the wall and stickers on the workbooks. Facebook was about publishing and reading personal diaries.

[1]no idea how is the current one as I have been without account for 5 years now

[alex1138]

Original Facebook was still stolen from ConnectU/houseSYSTEM and Myspace was reasonable about granular privacy controls (idk about Friendster. I imagine it was) whereas FB continually subverted it because MZ doesn't believe in privacy as a concept