Pictured: the kind of direct dopamine hit that Zoomers can only dream of

I think my boredom of writing about Bilt is only matched by your boredom of reading about it, so let’s do something more fun for a Friday before many of us prepare to bunker down for a stormy weekend.

Despite being somewhere around the median person described in the /r/churning demographic survey every year, a lot of my closest collaborators are somewhat older or younger than me, give or take a few years.

I think there’s a ton of positive output that comes out of working with people in a different cohort because they approach things in a different way. That being said, readers younger and older than me likely won’t have the same feeling of nostalgia for today’s hijinks. Don’t worry, I’ll set some context!

Regardless of how you feel about social media, you can’t deny that the dominant platform of the time left an indelible mark of the generation that was coming of age then.

For elder millennials, Gen X and beyond, you had access to the early platforms- things like bulletin boards, IRC, Xanga and Livejournal.

For Gen Z and younger, you were bombarded by Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook post-college requirement, Vine, Periscope, TikTok, YikYak, the list goes on and on.

But somewhere in between those cohorts was (in my humble opinion) the golden age of social media – MySpace. Connected enough to find something new outside of your network, but not completely beholden to an ever-evolving algorithm, MySpace felt like it struck the balance between fun and toxicity (let’s just ignore that whole top 8 thing, ok?)

One big difference between MySpace and all of the modern platforms was that it wasn’t centered around an activity feed of your friends. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a way to share activity, though. Bulletins were messages that showed in a small secondary feed that all of your friends could see.

There were many ways that bulletins were used, but no doubt the most iconic usage was MySpace surveys. Essentially “never have I ever” turned into a quantifiable score, these surveys were a fun way to share tastes in music and movies or lie about things that you hadn’t actually done to look cooler to classmates.

So, in honor of that more simple time of “rawr XD”, “PC4PC” and “*holds up spork*”, I vibe coded the MS & churning edition for you to take for funsies.

Click here to take the survey.

Let me know what category you end up in! For those of you staring down the barrel of some serious snowfall this weekend, good luck. This feels like a great weekend to run some couch plays instead.

Kuchemerera!

Pictured: What we’ve lost as a result of no longer having MySpace