Your social feed is 82% strangers — Myspace is planning a comeback around that

Myspace’s pitch for its comeback is striking for what it does not claim. The brothers who have owned the platform since 2011 are not selling nostalgia — they are selling a statistic: only 18% of content in the average social media feed now comes from people the user actually chose to follow. The remaining 82% is recommendations, sponsored posts, and branded content inserted by the platform’s algorithm.

Chris and Tim Vanderhook, who acquired Myspace in 2011 and have held it through multiple failed revival attempts since, believe that gap is their opening. “We are going to relaunch Myspace,” Tim Vanderhook said in a new documentary about the platform. “We are just waiting for the right time to do it.”

The case for that timing is more concrete than it sounds. Users on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and X report spending more time scrolling content from accounts they never sought out and less time hearing from the people they originally followed. The mechanics of algorithmic feeds — built to maximize time spent rather than connection depth — have produced the same outcome across every major platform. What was once called social media has, on its own numbers, become mostly not-social at all.

Myspace was architecturally different. At its 2006 peak, when it briefly surpassed Google and Yahoo Mail as the most visited website in the United States and counted more than 100 million users, the platform was built around profiles users designed themselves: custom backgrounds, curated music players, and a handpicked list of eight friends displayed at the top of every page. It also functioned as a genuine discovery engine for music. Adele, Arctic Monkeys, Lily Allen, and Calvin Harris all built early audiences on the platform before label deals, radio play, or mainstream attention caught up with them.

The Vanderhooks describe their planned relaunch as a return to that model — reduced algorithmic curation, customizable profiles, feeds populated by actual connections rather than content recommended by a machine. They have not specified which features would make that happen, and they have not given a release date.

That absence is the sharpest argument against them. A previous Myspace reboot in 2011, repositioned around music streaming, lost more than $150 million before it collapsed. Tom Anderson — who became every new user’s default first friend and the closest thing the original platform had to a public symbol — holds no involvement in the current revival. The platform the Vanderhooks would need to build now competes with TikTok’s roughly two billion users, Instagram’s 2.4 billion, and newer entrants like Threads and Bluesky that are already making the same algorithm-reduction argument with active product roadmaps.

A documentary by director Tommy Avallone, also titled Myspace, has renewed public attention around the platform and the revival. The Vanderhooks say they are waiting for the right time. They have not said when that is, or what the platform will look like when it arrives.

Tags: social media, algorithm, Chris Vanderhook, Myspace, platforms, social media fatigue