MySpace brought us a lot of awesome things. A way to avoid homework for 6 hours, rediscovering why you hated that kid in elementary school, and stalking ex-boyfriends while silently hating everything about them are a few of my favorites. However, as Facebook expanded from just the college crowd to businesses and eventually anyone with an internet connection, MySpace’s quality took a nosedive. Here are a few reasons that MySpace is dead.

1. The sparkly GIFs

Whoever started creating those sparkly, seizure-inducing GIF images that are so popular among the teen girl/immature adult woman/gay male crowd is probably a) a millionaire, and b) one of the prime reasons for the downfall of MySpace’s social networking glory. And once Twilight entered the picture — forget it. Sparkly GIFs exploded all over girl’s profiles like dazzling diarrhea, making for slow page loads and a general blood pressure increase that made MySpace unbearable.

2. Hackers

How many times did you get a “new comment” alert, zoomed over to see which of your friends said something great about you, only to realize that it was a hacker’s comment along the lines of  “omg i tried this acai diet and lost 15 pounds omg!” Near the end of MySpace’s fast and furious life, these comments became more and more prevalent. Peoples’ love of compliments and “we should hang out”s was threatened, and so they began the move to Facebook.

3. Embedded music players

Nothing ruined surfing MySpace at school like opening someone’s page only to have a heart-attack activating death metal song blow up from the speakers, scaring everyone in the computer lab and drawing all eyes to your monitor. It was your cue to close the window furiously, stand up, and leave immediately. Eventually an option was created to disable the dreaded embedded music file, but by then everyone was too frustrated with the site to give a crap.

4. Your crappy band

MySpace’s easy to navigate technology made it possible for every reject guitar player from your high school to upload his “band”s music (I use the word band loosely) to the site. They’d comment on your page saying, “come check out my new song,” and you’d be like, “no thanks, I think I’d rather drink warm strawberry milk in a sauna.”

5. MySpace “celebrities”

MySpace had a tendency to make people famous, who, under any other circumstances, would have rightfully remained as small town attention whores, not TV stars. Case in point: Tila Tequila. How a 4’11 young woman from Singapore with a nickname reminiscent of losing your virginity in Tijuana got her own reality show (two of them!) is 100% because of MySpace.

MySpace will forever live in infamy as the first mainstream social networking site, and someday we’ll tell our grandchildren about using “Tom’s MySpace Editor 2.0,” and  how we classified how much we liked our friends by literally ranking them in our “Top 8.”

We had a good run MySpace, but we’ve just outgrown you.