MySpace is apparently coming back, and investors are genuinely excited about the prospect of a social network that feels — and this is real — personal. Not algorithmic. Not engagement-maximized. Just you, your friends, and your auto-playing Nickelback track at full volume.
Here’s where the financial absurdity lives: we are in 2026, a year when the entire tech market is structured around one principle — extract maximum engagement, monetize every microsecond of attention, and feed users content designed by machine learning to keep them scrolling until their eyes hurt. Meta’s market cap sits north of a trillion dollars because it perfected this. TikTok’s valuation exists because it optimized the algorithm so aggressively that teenagers cannot stop using it. And now, investors are betting that people want the opposite.
The pitch is almost poetic in its contradiction: a platform designed around human connection rather than behavioral prediction. A feed that does not know what you want before you do. Profiles that reflect actual personality instead of a curated highlight reel selected by a neural network.
The problem is not whether this is a good idea — it probably is. The problem is that the market has spent two decades training investors to believe that the only valuable social network is one that makes money by knowing you better than you know yourself. A MySpace relaunch that actually prioritizes your experience over advertiser data would be a financial anomaly, not a feature.
If it actually launches this way, it will be the first social network in fifteen years that treats users as people rather than inventory. That is either brilliant or it will be bankrupt within eighteen months. The market has no middle ground for that kind of thing anymore.