To understand why MySpace was designed like it was, perhaps it's helpful to look at the man behind the orginal MySpace: it's the guy behind Demand Media.
They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.
His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".
Very little human input is required.
This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.
But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.
It's also effective.
He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.
If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.
It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.
Are you focussing on the post in question, and what it says, or are you just focussing on the notion of a spam filter and silly comments? No one is arguing against spam filters. FB sends a lot of email that serves no purpose other than to try to get a user to log in. Is that "spam"? Would FB be opposed if an email provider filtered all that mail out of the user's mailbox?
The question is: Does the post in question appear to contribute anything to a conversation? Or not? Perhaps it appears to promote other websites and seems a bit short on "content"? What makes it "spam"?
Look at the words the post contains.
If FB is really having trouble with spam, then that speaks to the design of FB. Does every FB user need to use a website on the open internet, that any spammer can access, to contact their friends and family?
The FB employee says they shut off the filter. I think that speaks for itself.
Spamming is very central to FB. Lots of unsolicited email, by default. Noteworthy is the early battle with Google over who gets access to your email contacts/address book.
Second is the female audience. Without them, FB loses its appeal to many people. And would fail to have gained momentum at universities.
If Mr. Zuckerberg had only stolen the email addresses and photos of his fellow male students at Harvard for his photo-comparison "project", which he noted, judging from the looks of some of his classmates, might as well include photos of "farm animals", and posted them online for other students to see, I sincerely doubt many would have cared.
However, if you obtain photos of female students, email them and tell them you have posted photos of them online, and others can rate their appearance, you can bet almost every one is going to sign up to check things out. This is the "secret" of FB's success. Because once the female students have signed up, the male students are soon to follow. This is also why Google+ is a relative ghost town.
I like the idea of FB: being able to communicate with almost everyone via the web. Who would not like that? It's great. And it will certainly not die with FB.
The MySpace interface was an abomination. The fact that users would tolerate it says something about the standard one has to meet to hold an audience. It's not very high.
FB has a clean interface, generally, but it's what's going on "behind the scenes" that is at issue here.
It sounds to me like FB is trying to win over advertisers who really are not interested in the web, except to the extent they can profit from it. And they may learn FB has led them to believe there is much more potential than the results actually show.
Meanwhile, the "consumers" using the web are generally interested in it. That includes ASCII art and LOL, as a means of communication. And not simply to discuss, purchase products and services.
FB is going to fade away. It's just a matter of time.
Because their motives are becoming more and more clear to even non-technical users, these motives are antithetical to the social (cf. commercial) premise of the internet, and they cannot maintain a monopoly on communication through the web, excluding other avenues by being "the only option". Couple this with advertisers who are still patiently waiting for results, results which will never come.
How can you call this anything other than censorship? There is no profanity, no objectionable content whatsoever in the post.
They own the domain name registrar eNom and Google SEO operations like eHow.
His idea is to churn out millions of pages of primarily machine-generated "content".
Very little human input is required.
This is enough to fool the search engine that it's what people want. Because the generated pages reflect what the search data says people are searching for.
But as anyone who has opened one of these pages knows, it has a certain "feel" to it. It vacuous. It's cheap.
It's also effective.
He earns a few pennies by having gotten you to look at the page, and once that's done, it matters little what you do or what you think next. Mission accomplished. In the aggregate, this design makes him money.
If you understand how a company like eNom makes money it also arguably fits with this sort of mass production idea.
It may be that MySpace was designed around the idea of mass production of "user-generated" pages. As a sort of fly trap to catch web surfers and searchers, similar to the way eHow or eNom would. Get users to help generate the pages. Not much input is needed. Just a little.
This is just how I see it. I could be wrong.