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Comment by JeremyMorgan | Hacker News Reader

Didn't read the article, but that's one of the things I like about Facebook the most. The ability to customize your profile on MySpace is part of what killed it.

Oh, you already forgot about the flashing animated gifs and snowflakes falling while 3 different videos and/or songs played?

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I had the exact same immediate reaction. Facebook was a smash hit in large part because of how restrictive and uniform it was. Could it not also be said that Twitter homogenizes communication and limits personal expression?

Twitter allows some degree of theming (color palette, banner, avatar), but I agree that these services definitely force you into a certain standard of representation or communication and it's probably helped them grow. There's something to be said of branding and "omakase".

You're right, everyone loves to wear exactly the same clothes in real life. It only makes sense that they'd want to wear the same "clothes" to express their online identity. It's obvious in retrospect. Silly MySpace!

oh people want to express themselves, but when it gets out of control, you get MySpace. It's not MySpace, it's the people.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, and I actually miss it. Yes, it was ugly, but it gave people agency. Facebook forces every single person to "look" more or less the same. I imagine there has to be at least one kid who got into CSS styling by trying to make their MySpace profile look cool, introducing them to web design...

Facebook's enforced "look" is sort of the equivalent of a school uniform, except for everyone, and it's stifling.

I prefer the enforced look of Facebook to the custom MySpace themes. That being said, MySpace is definitely the reason I first learned CSS and JavaScript. I might not have become a web developer without it!

Why not implement a "theme-less" viewing mode? If the surfer prefers to see everything looking the same, it's simple to offer such a mode.

Why do you prefer "the enforced look of Facebook"?

And yet Tumblr thrives on it, automatically playing music, custom cursors and all.

Tumblr continues to have a higher and higher percentage of unreadable "blogs" because of the increasing number of horribly looking themes being created. Just like MySpace, it will flame out and Facebook will out live it.

Personally, I don't enrage in any of that nonsense.

Tumblr content is read primarily from a tumblr account dashboard, which has a consistent look.

Source?

I guess I don't have a source for this and don't know that it's strictly true, but tumblr is certainly /designed/ with collated dashboard reading of content as its intended use case. The actual blogs at tumblr subdomains are incidental to how registered tumblr users use tumblr, and those are the people tumblr is focusing on. I think the only blogs whose content are primarily read at the blog level are those tumblr blogs that are actually some organization's website blog and which are consequently well-designed.

I think Bebo found a nice middle ground. You could customise your profile with a 'theme'. These themes followed certain guidelines and the layout of elements on the page reminded the same. Of course there were bad themes that ruined readability of pages but nothing as horrible as MySpace. Personally Prefer the Facebook approach but I think there is a middle ground.

You should really read the article before you say anything about it.

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