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Speaker 1: My Space was the first major social media company. At

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Speaker 1: that time in my life, I was like getting bullied

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Speaker 1: really bad, and then on my Space people like loved

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Speaker 1: how I look looked up to me, like loved my style.

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Speaker 1: It was a trip, and it was the first major

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Speaker 1: social media company to collapse. The story of my Space

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Speaker 1: was about a bunch of people who were really not

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Speaker 1: that good at what they did, but we're successful. My

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Speaker 1: name is Joanne McNeil. I'm a writer who covered internet

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Speaker 1: culture since the early days of social media. Of all

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Speaker 1: the companies I've written about, my Space is the most compelling.

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Speaker 1: On my new podcast, Main Accounts the Story of my Space,

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Speaker 1: I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the

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Speaker 1: people who lived it. The users just went from like

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Speaker 1: zero sixty on, like I'm in ninth grade and I'm

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Speaker 1: posting pictures from my friencing tournament to taking all of

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Speaker 1: my regular friends off just adding like hundreds of kids

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Speaker 1: with like dark emo bangs and an eyeliner just every

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Speaker 1: day like hundreds of strangers. The social network often felt

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Speaker 1: like a house party thrown when someone's parents were out

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Speaker 1: of town. But life on my Space could be messy

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Speaker 1: and chaotic. Now we have this concept of online safety.

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Speaker 1: There wasn't that in the two thousands, and sometimes unspeakably tragic.

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Speaker 1: Probably twenty minutes later, I just had a horrible feeling

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Speaker 1: that ran through my entire body. I stopped in mid

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Speaker 1: sentence and ran up to a room. At the height

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Speaker 1: of its popularity, a quarter million users were signing up

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Speaker 1: for new accounts every day. We were all figuring out

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Speaker 1: how to live online together in real time. They made

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Speaker 1: the Internet, which up until then had been kind of

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Speaker 1: like a nerdy space, feel like a nightclub, like I

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Speaker 1: feel like a cool place and also slightly dame chers

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Speaker 1: It's a wild West, you know. Way before bizdev deals

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Speaker 1: for partnerships were coming along, things were just happening. What

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Speaker 1: was this social media sensation? Who is MySpace? Tom? Why

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Speaker 1: did news Court make a play for the social network?

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Speaker 1: Rupert Murnock lost lots and lots of money on MySpace

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Speaker 1: because it turned out it was actually not a good business.

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Speaker 1: Why aren't people using MySpace now? I remember one day

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Speaker 1: realizing that I had only been using Facebook for weeks

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Speaker 1: and weeks and hadn't checked my MySpace at all. We'll

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Speaker 1: explore all that and more, because what happened in the

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Speaker 1: MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms

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Speaker 1: to follow. If the beginning of Tila Tequila being on

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Speaker 1: my radar as this MySpace influencer for being a queer

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Speaker 1: woman of color, if that was like the promise of

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Speaker 1: the Internet. The day that I saw that image of

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Speaker 1: her doing a Nazi salute with a bunch of all

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Speaker 1: right dirtbags, that was the nail in the coffin. And

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Speaker 1: so I feel like that moment for me really crystallized

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Speaker 1: where we started and unfortunately, where we wound up. Listen

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Speaker 1: to main accounts the story of MySpace starting March fifteenth

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Speaker 1: on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you

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Speaker 1: find your favorite shows