We first reached out to digital archivist Jason Scott in episode five about the MySpace data loss. It turns out Jason had a lot more to say about his place in MySpace history that didn't make it into that episode.
Originals. This is an iHeart original. Thanks for listening to main accounts. The story of MySpace bonus episode here. When we first reached out to Jason Scott, the digital archivist featured in episode five, we knew he'd have a lot to say about the MySpace data loss. It turns out Jason has a lot more to say about MySpace. He has a story which is actually known in certain corners as the Jason Scott MySpace story.
There will be a segment of people who will be furious if they find out you interviewed Jason Scott and you don't know the MySpace story. Do you know that Jason Scott MySpace story?
Oh no, I'm sorry.
I didn't go No, no, no, no, no, that's fine, that's fine, it's fine. But I'm doing this for you. I'm going to give you so much. I'm going to give you this story because they're going to go you talked to Jason Scott and you didn't talk about blank, and that will be And again, I'm not telling you this story because I'm like, this needs to go in got it. I'm telling you this story because otherwise people will literally.
It's a funny and illustrative example of how images worked on the social network and something known as hotlinking. I'll let Jason take it from here, all.
Right, let's go, let's go, let's go, let's do let's do it all right. So I run a site called text files dot com, and text files dot com is a collection of bulletin boards system era files items from the nineteen eighties when people would write lots of things in text and transfer them by modem. And I was very worried in the nineteen nineties that with this brand new Internet everything was going to disappear of the bulletin board system era. So I gathered up everything i'd collected, registered the name text files dot com, and I put it up and it was very popular for the time, hundreds of thousands of people a month. People just loved having that old history. Some of them it was personal history, and for others it was like weird views of what the world was like. And so over time, though, I discovered that it was really a job that was never going to end because there were other aspects. There were things like old demo seeing artworks, you know, beautifully drawn pictures, beautifully created music using very old music formats that would be like MIDI, and so I started to make more and more and more sites associated with text files dot com, artsecene, dot text files dot com, and even pdf dot text files dot com for documents. About that time, so Here, I was minding my own business with a nice sight that I ran no ads as my own little place, and one day I noticed that my bandwidth was being used like a lot, like wow, it's like a hundred times more than it used to be. It keeps going, in fact, and I run some of my log analyzers and I go, it's one image. It's just one image, and it's of a grim reaper and it's from this piece of art, you know, that was part of some art scene creation. It was. It was nice, it's beautiful, but it was being accessed like literally hundreds of thousands of times an hour, and I couldn't figure it out. So I started to do some research and I discovered it was on MySpace, and there was a MySpace theme, you know, because you could order a MySpace theme so that it would be this color text and this graphic background and so on, so people could make themes. And there was a theme that was really really popular with people, and it hot linked to my grim Reaper. Now I don't know what to do, and I hadn't paid too much attention to my Space, and that was when I found out, to my horror that there was no buffering going on. So every time you read a new message, every time you clicked on a link and that was in the background, it would load it for me again, over and over and over and over and over. So it's not a financial lean because of the way I had things set up, but it was definitely a bandwidth leen. It was definitely like, my god, what are they doing to me? So I replaced the image, and I replaced the image with goats, with this horrifying image that at the time was it was unsure where it had come from. It was a bizarre photo of somebody pulling apart the cheeks of their own buttocks at the camera and it was a shock image, and I wrote at the bottom. I added text to it and said, hey, MySpace, look what you did to my ass. Please stop. And then chaos erupted on my Space. So it's going everywhere. Nobody knows how to get rid of it. You can see posts from people saying I don't know what to do. I don't know how to fix the problem. Oh my god, you know, just this shock and I watched it get grabbed hundreds of thousands of times. But now I was the master. I was in control until finally the company that was selling the theme of the Grim Reaper they were charging people, contacted me, telling me I needed to change it because it was ruining their product. And I went no, and I left it up there forever. And at the time, I thought, there's actually some consequences to this, like this interlinking Internet, this idealistic way of putting things together. And I wrote a blog post called Freedom, Justice, and a disturbingly Gaping Ass back in the early two thousands that is one of my most popular essays about the pros and cons of an interlin world that lives with bad actors. And from then on, I promise you, because no matter what I've accomplished, three documentaries, working for the Internet Archive, doing presentations and speeches and Archive team and all of these things I've done, somebody somewhere deep in the comments we'll mention MySpace and there's nothing I can do about it. And it's gonna be on my grave when I die. So anyway, that's the Jason Scott MySpace story.
Okay, that is definitely a MySpace story. Thanks for listening to Maine Accounts The Story of MySpace and iHeart Original podcast Main Accounts. The Story of MySpace is written and hosted by me Joanne McNeil. Editing but sound design by Mike Coscarelli and Mary Do Original music by Alice McCoy, Mixing and mastering by Josh Fisher, Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson, Joson Sears, and Marissa Brown. Show logo by Lucy Kintania. Special thanks to Ryan Murdoch Grace Views at the Head Frasier. Our associate producer is Lauren Phillip, our senior producer is Mike Coscarelli, and our executive producer is Jason English. If you're enjoying the show, leave us a rating and review on your favorite podcast platform Sadly, my MySpace page is no longer around, but you can find me on Twitter at Joe Mick. Let us hear your MySpace story and check out my book Lurking Main Accounts. The Story of MySpace is a production of iHeart Podcasts.