Holding Pattern

2022 is a holding pattern, and this chapter is short because the year was.

What did not change

Ownership: Viant, publicly listed, Vanderhooks in charge. Product: music, artist pages, the archive, editorial content. Traffic: low, search-driven, stable. Headcount on the property: small.

What changed around it

Everything. 2022 was the year the incumbent social platforms became visibly unpopular with the people using them. Twitter was acquired in October and entered the most chaotic period in its history. Instagram pushed hard toward algorithmic short-form video and faced open user revolt, including a widely covered campaign asking it to stop trying to be TikTok. Facebook's parent company reported its first-ever revenue decline. "Enshittification" entered the vocabulary the following year, describing a process people had been experiencing for a while.

The common complaint was consistent and specific: I no longer see the people I chose to follow. The feed decides. The recommendation engine has replaced the social graph.

Analysis: 2022 is when the market MySpace could theoretically re-enter actually opened. Not because people wanted MySpace, but because for the first time since 2009 a large number of people wanted something other than what the incumbents were providing, and were saying so in the specific language of algorithmic control. Every subsequent statement from MySpace's owners about being "less algorithmic" is a response to the sentiment that crystallised in this year. Whether they can build against it is a separate question, but the opening is real and it dates from here.

The people

Tim and Chris Vanderhook running Viant. Tom Anderson still on Instagram, still photographing, still uninterested. Chris DeWolfe long since moved on to games. The founders are not part of this half of the story, and any relaunch that implies otherwise is selling something.

What it felt like

Nothing, from inside MySpace. A great deal, from everywhere else.

Why this matters in 2026

If you want to know why anyone would restart MySpace in the mid-2020s, the answer is not nostalgia. It is that the incumbents spent 2022 teaching a very large audience to articulate exactly what they dislike, in terms that describe a product MySpace once was by accident.