MySpace gave teenagers a character creator and then connected it to everyone they knew.
Nobody called it LARPing.
You were just "doing your profile."
Pick the song.
Pick the layout.
Pick the photos.
Write the bio.
Choose who makes the Top 8.
Maybe change your display name to some lyric surrounded by symbols that made the entire thing nearly unreadable.
Refresh.
Look at it again.
Change the song.
Refresh.
Perfect.
This was supposed to be a profile of a real person, but everybody understood that the page itself was a performance.
It was you.
Just extremely edited.
The profile was the outfit
Modern social profiles are weirdly restrictive compared to MySpace.
You get a picture.
A bio.
A header if the platform is feeling generous.
Maybe a pinned post.
MySpace handed people the whole wall.
Backgrounds.
Colors.
Fonts.
Images.
Autoplaying music.
Custom HTML.
Glittering garbage.
A cursor that left stars behind it for some reason.
You could make your page look like the inside of your brain after drinking three energy drinks in a Hot Topic.
And people did.
The profile itself told you what kind of person somebody wanted to be before you read a single sentence.
Black background, tiny white text, some song from Bring Me the Horizon.
Okay. We have information.
Pink everything, enormous cursive font, 46 photos with the same three friends.
Also information.
A tasteful page with one obscure band nobody at school had heard of yet.
That was information too, and probably the most calculated version.
Nobody had the phrase "identity signalling" in their vocabulary.
They just knew the profile needed to look right.
The song was part of the character
Profile music was especially insane.
You visited somebody's page and they could force a song on you.
That song was not just decoration.
It was a statement.
Sometimes it meant:
This is my favorite song.
Sometimes:
This is the kind of person I am.
Sometimes:
This lyric is absolutely about what happened Friday night and one specific person better notice.
Changing your profile song could be an announcement.
No post required.
No explanation.
If you knew, you knew.
That is internet LARP in one of its purest forms.
Take a normal feature and use it to imply a much larger story around yourself.
Then there was the Top 8
The Top 8 might be one of the funniest social mechanics ever shipped.
It took friendship, something vague and emotional and socially messy, and turned it into a visible leaderboard.
Your closest people were right there.
Ranked.
Publicly.
And everybody looked.
Moving somebody down could mean something.
Removing somebody definitely meant something.
Putting a new person near the top meant something.
People were doing reputation management with their actual friends before most of us had heard the words reputation management.
The Top 8 was not fake exactly.
That's what makes this stuff interesting.
The people were usually real.
The friendships were real.
The feelings were real.
But the arrangement was still a public performance.
You were deciding what version of your social world everyone else got to see.
That is basically what every social platform does now.
MySpace just had the decency to make the ranking obvious.
Everybody was building a version of themselves
The internet persona did not begin with anonymous crypto accounts or Instagram influencers.
MySpace kids were doing it with worse cameras and more CSS.
The goth kid made the page more goth.
The scene kid made the page aggressively scene.
The skater made sure there were skate photos.
The person who had gone to exactly one local show suddenly had the right band on autoplay and a profile that suggested they practically lived backstage.
People exaggerated.
People curated.
People copied each other.
People discovered genuinely new parts of themselves by trying them on publicly.
Sometimes the profile was who somebody already was.
Sometimes it was who they wanted to become.
Usually it was both.
That is the part of online identity people miss when they reduce LARPing to "being fake."
You can perform something without completely inventing it.
A 15-year-old building the world's most committed emo MySpace page may actually love the music.
They are also clearly constructing a character.
Those things are not mutually exclusive.
We just use cleaner templates now
The messy customization mostly disappeared.
Platforms realized standardization scales better.
Everyone gets the same box.
The same feed.
The same dimensions.
The same buttons.
But people kept doing the exact same thing inside the box.
Instagram grid.
Twitter PFP.
TikTok reposts.
Spotify Wrapped.
Letterboxd favorites.
Discord status.
Pinned posts.
Following list.
Even the choice to have no profile picture starts saying something once everyone else has one.
People will use whatever tiny controls a platform gives them to communicate who they are.
Or who they want you to think they are.
MySpace was just unusually honest about the whole thing because it gave you so many controls that the construction was impossible to hide.
Nobody's page happened accidentally.
You built it.
Then you hoped the right people looked at it.
Which, stripped of the glitter GIFs and terrible HTML, is still basically social media.