The MySpace bug that taught a generation web design
Tyler digs into the one MySpace bug that accidentally taught a whole generation how to code: that infamous About Me box that let you paste raw HTML and CSS to completely override your profile. He walks through how millions of teenagers turned copy-pasted glitter code and stolen snippets into a real (if chaotic) education in web design, and how that kind of hands-on customization quietly disappeared as platforms shifted toward clean, algorithm-friendly templates. It's part nostalgia trip, part case study in how convenience and control replaced ownership, and it ties right back into the bigger question of who actually gets to shape the platforms we use every day.
MySpace. Yeah, we're talking about that website. MySpace had a hole in it that let you override your own profile with, well, whatever you wanted. I think it probably wasn't supposed to work that way. Nobody ever fixed it. And it accidentally taught an entire generation how to do web design. There was a text file. That lived on my home computer back in high school. Just sitting there on the desktop. I can't for the life of me Remember what the file was called, but if you opened it it probably looked like absolute nonsense You know to my parents it might as well had been
written in another language You had things in there like hex codes blocks of HTML maybe some CSS no labels no type of organization. No, none of that. Just chunks of code that I had grabbed off of other people's pages and hoarded it like that dragon in the hobbit who hoarded all the gold. The file was probably one of the most important documents of my high school time. I had a lot of good notes in that thing. Couldn't tell you where that file went now, but... Uh, but I'm not taking questions on that. Quick disclaimer before I get going here. All of this is my opinion, my memory, my take. I'm Tyler. Welcome to the
podcast. Let's talk about MySpace. Not the, uh, top eight drama where if you rearranged your friends, people would lose their mind on what it could mean. And we're not talking about Tom being everybody's. First friend, but actually speaking of Tom Did you know he's still out there? He's on Facebook and Instagram. He did some photos back in 2011 At the Burning Man festival, and I think he's on threads now, too. I think or he was I don't remember but also this isn't going to be a It's not it's not going to be a funeral about myspace because the internet's already done that a thousand times over No, we're not
gonna rehash that I want to get into the single biggest thing that MySpace had going for it. The biggest thing that MySpace ever did. Either on purpose or not so on purpose. And the thing that nobody has tried to bring back since. Being able to customize your page. Customizability. Either again on purpose or not so on purpose. MySpace let you break your own profile on purpose. And eventually that became a feature. Now, again, was that actually meant to be a feature? Was somebody sitting in a boardroom going, hey, you know what we should do? We should give millions
of teenagers access to redesign our front end. Probably not. You know what's awesome though? MySpace profile pages. had that hole in there. The about me box. It didn't just take text. You could throw in HTML, CSS, and it would run it. Whatever you pasted in there overrode the layout, the colors, the styling, not part of it, the whole thing, the background, the fonts, the colors, where everything set on the page. That was a bug. It was just a bug. but a fun bug it's a bug that a couple million like -minded teenagers
all found around the same time and thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened if you're running a myspace profile back in 2005 and people are loving it yeah you're probably not fixing that do you remember the first time you landed on a page that didn't look like everybody else's None of the blue and the white and the orange Somebody I knew Back in high school had a custom background custom fonts the whole nine yards, and I remember sitting there Thinking Hold on wait a minute you can do that Nobody
told me you could do that and when I found out man it was over every spare hour I had went into that stupid MySpace page. After school, on the weekends, sitting at the family computer, in the computer room. Remember those? Because I mean, there was no MySpace on your phone. That wasn't a thing yet. You wanted to work on your MySpace profile, you sat there in the chair. And there were sites for this. You remember these? The layout sites, the code generators, page after
page of pre -made themes. You'd copy a wall of code, paste it into that box, hit save, and pray that it looked like that one from the example. Sometimes you get something that looked absolutely amazing, absolutely gorgeous. Sometimes you get white text. on a white background and a sidebar that had relocated over to the nether realm. Either way, you were learning something, whether you meant to or not. That whole broken mess was, you know, free coding education running at full blast. But it was the, it was, you know, disguised
as, uh, well, I mean, to a bunch of kids in the early 2000s, it was a popularity contest. You'd see the page that you liked, you would view the source, start pulling chunks out of it, like some web design wizard. What's this table do? What's this element do? What happens if I change this little number? Hang on, why did my entire page just turn hot pink? You know, stuff like that. Nobody assigned any... You know school assignments on this millions of kids did it anyways Because they wanted their corner of the internet to look cooler than their friends corner over there And I was one of them you were too don't
lie to me that notepad file Was my textbook and I wrote it myself with chunks of information little snippets that I had found across the internet one one stolen little piece at a time Compare that to how you would learn to build a page today. You pick a template, you drag some blocks around inside lines somebody else already drew for you, right? And the platform, it actively tries and stop you from touching the code underneath. That's a no -no. You can't do that even if you wanted to, even if you know how to. No view source no box to paste into You know that whole Customality
that on -ramp that whole thing that's gone. We get sterile pages now and apps That all look identical to one another Think back to August of 2003 that's when myspace launches July of 2005, the big bad news Corp, the big bad boys behind Fox announced they're buying MySpace's parent company for about $580 million. It was a cash deal. By June of 2006, it had passed Yahoo and Google to become the most visited website
in the United States. In 2008, it's pulling in around $800 million a year. That's a lot of money. A website where teenagers pasted glitter code snippets into a text box out trafficked Google and Yahoo. And yes, the results were often hideous as all hell. I mean, you remember those. You had the autoplay music that ambushed you at maximum percent volume the second the damn page loaded You had the you had the glitter graphics cursors with trails on them snow Christmas lights in
July pages that took 40 damn seconds to load because somebody Embedded six damn videos on top of each other the visitor hit counters all that crap that was in there It was chaos. It was absolute chaos, but it was our chaos. It was your chaos. Every ugly ass page was ugly in its own completely unique way. It was special because a specific person made it with some questionable set of bad decisions to get there. You could land on a stranger's profile and know something about them before you read a single word they put on that page. I mean, I met my wife on MySpace
in 2007. No kidding. MySpace had chat rooms. That's how we met. That's a whole other episode. I'll get to it at some point. Don't worry. But try that today. I mean, go ahead. Every profile on every platform is the same template with a different photo dropped into the same little circle. Same font, same layout, same everything really. You could swap the names on a thousand accounts and I guarantee you nobody would notice because nothing's unique anymore. It's sterile.
It all looks the same. Where did the permission go? When did we say no to fun pages? Because I don't remember anybody taking a vote on this. I didn't get a vote. The ability to make your MySpace page yours just quietly Vanished one day before we knew it. It was gone platform by platform And I couldn't tell you exactly when I if I had to Put a time on it. I would say Probably
somewhere around when I get on Facebook Which was probably late 2005 2006 somewhere in there. I think maybe And I guess at that time, I think we all kind of wanted it. You know, Facebook was clean. It was fast. It was polished for, I mean, 2005 standards. Everything loaded. I definitely didn't miss the damn glitter. I mean, at least that's how I felt then. They'll tell you too it was about security. And to be fair, yes, the... The security problems were real. That hole in the about me box was a code injection vector. And I mean, people were misusing it.
I mean, they were absolutely using it in that way, but I don't, uh, I don't think that's mostly what happened. I think it's, it's much simpler than that. A page that, uh, that you spent, you know, four hours building as a page. you sort of sit with. You linger on it for a little bit. You're proud of it, right? And lingering, well, that's sort of poison to, you know, the feed and the algorithms. A feed, especially today, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, whatever other flavor out there, a feed needs you moving. It needs
you scrolling, swiping past a thousand identical stupid little boxes. Customization, it slows you down. And slowing down doesn't feed the algorithm. And it sure as hell doesn't sell ads. Zuckerberg and Musk, they need some more money, right? So, I mean, the box where you could... Paste your weird little HTML get replaced with a template You're allowed to fill it in You are never ever allowed to touch it Outside of that Customize make it yours. I Don't think I uh, you know stopped
customizing because I grew out of it they the option just kind of slowly got taken away and then somebody told me The sterile version was the one that I wanted all along. Also, let's be upfront about this. MySpace didn't die a martyr here either. All right, let's be honest about that. News Corp, you know, the big bad boys behind Fox News Channel, bought it at an absolute top premium billing and ran it straight into the dirt. Sold it. in June of 2011 for about $35 million, mostly in stock, to an ad network. You know who was one of the, uh, the, uh, the guys
who bought it? Justin Timberlake. Yeah, the guy that was bringing sexy back. He took a piece of it. Murdoch, you know, the guy behind News Corp and Fox, later called the whole thing a huge mistake. Yeah, I bet. 580 million to 35 million in only six years. That's not losing to a better idea. That's buying the coolest thing on the internet and carefully managing the cool right on out of it. That era was the most fun I think the internet had ever been. You know, maybe outside of GeoCities and AngelFire and
those kind of pages. Definitely not the smoothest. It was really rough around the edges. It also wasn't the safest. You know, and definitely not the best looking. The most fun though. You could really demonstrate your personality. That's what I miss about it. Because back then, The deal was simple. Here's a box. Here's some code. Go make something awesome. And we said, at that time in the 2000s, we said yes so hard that we accidentally taught ourselves web design without ever meaning to. So did a couple million other
people sitting in their own chairs in that computer room back in 2005 at their at the the family computer. Somewhere out there on a dead hard drive, there's a notepad file full of hex codes with my name on it. I'm sure that file is gone. I don't think I've got that drive anymore, but what it taught me never left. I'm still out there creating, still out there making websites. And I think we need to get back to that that part of the Internet where we can Customize and show our own personalities again, so we're not Trying to be like everybody else out there. We need to be unique individuals again That's the show
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