DIY Apps Are the New Myspace

Remember when your Myspace profile was a canvas for your digital self-expression? That feature—the ability to customize your page with HTML and CSS—started with a coding error. In an amazing example of “what’s old is new again,” Aleena Vigoda finds that the same dynamic that led MySpace to once burn so brightly is now powering an explosion of niche, personalized apps fueled by the current wave of AI software creation.

Plus: On Wednesday, March 26, Dan Shipper and Company Ventures partner Matthew Harrigan will kick off a year-long series, AI Review, with a talk by Google’s Steven Johnson, the editorial director of NotebookLM, in New York City. Learn more and register to attend.—Kate Lee

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What made Myspace such a vibe? A coding error.

Myspace—one of the internet’s first third spaces—spawned out of the L.A. indie music scene in the early 2000s. Replete with different ways to establish your online presence, including sharing videos, writing blog posts, and uploading audio, the platform was a kitchen sink of social features. 

But what made Myspace really sticky was that you could stylize your profile down to the very code, using custom HTML/CSS to personalize what you shared along with how it looked on your page.

These user-generated markups weren’t originally supposed to be part of the platform’s core functionality; the team forgot to block users from adding their own backgrounds and designs. Overnight, users started exploiting the leak, changing wallpaper colors and uploading “hearts and glitter and smiley faces the same way that [they would] decorate their lockers and book bags,” CNET staffer Zachary McAuliffe wrote in a 2022 Myspace retrospective.

“I even remember adding a cartoon dog named Lightning to my page that visitors could interact with by giving the pooch virtual treats.” 

After seeing how much fun people were having with custom code, Myspace decided to run with it, turning the DIY experience from a bug (and security breach) into a feature. 

“Users come first, and this is what they want” is a direct quote from one of the company’s then-vice presidents. Could you imagine any Meta executive saying that today?

Myspace let users decorate—and showcase—their digital habitats, adorning their profiles with personalized HTML/CSS. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do, but the learning curve was part of the fun: People liked that they had to teach themselves to code to shape their in-app experience. People were proud of the work they put into designing their digital aesthetic.

People were so proud, in fact, that tutorials and how-to guides became part of the platform’s culture. Sharing and remixing templates became a social feature—a channel for connection and engagement. These user behaviors nurtured a sense of loyalty, enthusiasm, and kinship across the app. 

As Facebook rose to power, though, Myspace scrambled to stay relevant. What was profitable—consumption, paid for by advertisers—simply didn’t work on a social platform that catered to customization and creation. Ads made an endearingly chaotic social canvas feel cluttered and impersonal, while Facebook’s streamlined algorithms nurtured our burgeoning, collective addiction to the infinite scroll.

Today, ads are a tiresomely tried-and-true business model, and consumption has become a finite resource. With every social platform competing to colonize our attention span, feature parity has become less about delivering the most value for your users, and more about prioritizing channels that manipulate engagement to inflate likes, scrolls, and shares. Profit maximization has taken precedent over user experience—but those ad-based revenue streams are becoming increasingly saturated.

Meanwhile, creator/developer tools (e.g., Canva and Figma for designers; Framer for website builders; Lovable for full-stack coders; Glif for AI app builders) have built devoted communities  of target users who contribute custom-made goods—whether templates, plugins, or full-stack apps—to on-platform marketplaces. These digital spaces have figured out how to pair the sentiment of people being proud of what they make with a place to distribute and sell their creations—while cycling a cut of that revenue back into their own platform economies.

Generative AI makes software easier to build than ever—democratizing the apps we exist on and, more importantly, the revenue structures that drive them. Instead of optimizing for network effects and building for features that scale, a new generation of software makers is taking inspiration from long-tail content creators and cultivating hyper-personalized software for tightly-knit, niche audiences. Community is central to the success of these businesses—it’s the MySpace effect, reborn. 

Come for the app, stay for the scene

The rise of centralized social platforms like X and Facebook that keep and own our social data has left many people longing for smaller, quieter, intimate third spaces that offer a reprieve from saturated algorithms. 

In 2019, former Kickstarter co-founder and current Metalabel co-founder Yancey Strickler coined the dark forest theory of the internet: the notion that consumers are prey in an eerily still, digital forest,  with predatory social networks sucking up user information and forcibly exposing people to endless, ad-cluttered feeds.

From this, Venkatesh Rao derived his cozyweb thesis, defined by discrete internet dwellings—niche, gate-kept channels like private Discord servers, community forums, and personal newsletters, which tend to be invite-only and shared first with IRL friends—like Myspace’s original inception.

Cozyweb conversation mediums may scratch the intimacy itch for social app purveyors, giving people autonomy over where they spend their time and who they spend it with, but they can’t give people the creativity fix that Myspace’s personal customization features granted. 

“Tools for thought”—apps and platforms that make it easier to organize your knowledge repositories, lay out your thinking, and work most productively—however, do.