The MySpace Experiment
I loathe MySpace. It is a poorly coded, badly designed, ugly, bloated heap of garbage. It’s users (apologies to my RL friends), dwell near the far left of the bellcurve, the nadir of intelligence and originality. They fill their profiles with nightmarish stylesheets, embed angsty emo videos or horrid soundclips, and type out long incoherent misspelled blog post. In essence, MySpace represents all that is wrong with the internet.
First, the actual site. Simple functions, such as viewing profile, logging in, or reading messages is an exercise in frustration. In addition to being deluged by large ads and an unintuitive workflow, the site it terribly slow and unresponsive. If anything, this is the screen that appears most during primetime:
Although a good portion of my friends created their own profiles, I boycotted the entire thing. However, I decided to have a little fun. Thus begins my MySpace Experiment, and what follows is for the most part Not Safe for Work:
Here’s the site I created: fukcmyspace (img saved for posterity)
Very typical for a MySpace user: clashing color scheme, bubblegum leetspeek, and of course the near-pornographic avatar gif. This was key – bait if you will – for spreading my social “net”. Immediately, I was flooded with friend request. My bait had worked.
Cam whores, e-thugs, emo whiners, goths, aZnS, pervs and pornstars, they all came flocking.
Usernames varied widely: Wesheezy, Dancin’ Bare, The F’n Master, dELiCi0uS, My10GallonJuggs, ladies leave porn in the comments (whose avatar is a large silohetted phalus), even “~:’:;.mSz.aMbErA_.;:’:~”
I was intrigued. Why would these people befriend me? My profile was devoid of any redeeming qualities, my sole “blog” post professed hatred of myspace. Ah, but yes, never underestimate the enticing power of hot girl eating a banana.
Next came comments. Some honest:
*Hey, whats good wit you. just thought id let you know that you were my 69th friend. thats whats up….i think we are soul mates. LOL! Anyway, get at me *
Some perverted:
*justw wanted say u looking good like ur style emial me abck if u want to talk more ill make u wet ahha *
Some pathetic (from 16 year old Zach):
can u do that to me
Eventually I got bored and let the account sit, festering if you will. Every so often I would check back, with 15, 20, 30 friend requests. I accepted them all, a digital christ: “Come to me, all who are retarded, all who expose themselves via webcams, all who are heartbroken from e-romance, for I will give you rest. I will accept you as my friend on myspace. Together, with our powers combined, we will clog the interweb with vast idiocy and douchebaggery.”
But that happy relationship had to end. I came across a script, a tiny code dagger (courtesy of ytmnd forums) that would put these fuckers where they belonged. In the end, I really shouldn’t blame the dumbass users, but the developers (that Tom dude). These lazy slackers left in all the html tags in the name of customability. The < embed> tag for example, lets you inundate an ugly page with the latest Hillary Duff video. It also lets you link a flash file that auto-redirects to shock sites (meatspin, tubgirl, goatsecx, yum…)
Mean, yes. But the diseased masses disserved no better than to be flushed with the bilgewater. It was a slow (ty myspace servers) and painful job (I have to verify said shock-site is loading…), but in the end – ’twas glorious.
Edit: the shockwave files have lost their host, so the old ‘sploits are gone. Here’s the script tho (fix embed tags) –
< embed src=’