Why six million people want MySpace back

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**SPEAKER_1** (1:28)
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**SPEAKER_4** (1:30)
Chris and Tim Vanderhook, the owners of Viant Technology, are actually bringing the original customizable social network, MySpace, back. The original founder is entirely out of the picture, so it's just the brothers.
They bought the platform years ago and are now actively plotting a full return for the site.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:48)
Which is fascinating because Viant operates deep in the heavy plumbing of ad tech.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:52)
Right.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:52)
I mean, they deal in massive data sets, cross-device tracking, highly targeted media buying.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:58)
Yeah, exactly.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:59)
They build these systems specifically to track you from your phone to your smart TV and hit you with an ad with mathematical precision.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:08)
Right. And yet, they are sitting on this dormant property that is basically the exact opposite of modern, optimized advertising environments. And without even setting a formal relaunch date, the waitlist has inexplicably jumped from 200,000 to 6 million people.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:22)
Six million.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:23)
Yeah, six million people waiting for it.

**SPEAKER_5** (2:25)
I mean, six million people actively seeking out a platform that is historically known for being clunky and difficult to use completely contradicts how we usually think about consumer behavior. We always assume tech progress is this straight line, right?
We expect users to naturally flock to whatever removes the most effort from their day. If an app can predict what you want to see before you even type a search query, the industry logic says that's just inherently superior to a platform where you have to manually look for things.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:55)
Well, the mechanics of the contemporary web are engineered to be totally frictionless. For a decade now, the ultimate goal for every major platform has been to just strip away any barrier between you and the next piece of content.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:08)
Yeah, just keep you feeding.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:09)
But that frictionless design creates a very specific kind of fatigue. People are hitting a wall with feeds that operate like casino games. Every scroll, every notification, the auto playing videos, it's all engineered by behavioral psychologists to keep your eyes glued to the screen for a few extra milliseconds.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:26)
Right, so running backward to an obsolete platform feels like a direct rejection of that hyper optimized machinery.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:33)
Exactly. So the real question for you listening is whether this sudden return is just a temporary hit of nostalgia or if we're watching the beginning of a total rejection of the algorithmic Internet.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:44)
To figure that out, we have to look at the exact mechanics of what the Vanderhooks are bringing back.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:48)
Right.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:48)
We're talking about strict chronological feeds.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:50)
Yes.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:51)
Content appears in the exact order it was posted. No machine deciding what's engaging or what keeps you on the site.

**SPEAKER_4** (3:58)
They're also bringing back the ranking of your top friends, which is sure to cause some drama.

**SPEAKER_2** (4:03)
Oh, for sure.

**SPEAKER_4** (4:03)
And the mandatory profile song that just starts playing the second someone visits your page. But maybe the biggest thing is they are bringing back raw HTML coding. You have to manually build the environment you want to exist in.

**SPEAKER_5** (4:16)
I mean, people really romanticize that era, but we should be honest about how objectively terrible the user experience was by today's standards. HTML was messy. Pages were constantly broken.