You mistake what I mean, I meant that the sites that came after appeared more technical to the end user. Also those examples you give came before Facebook (mostly? Haven't even heard of some), which Facebook beat by providing a better service. That includes performance sure, also by restricting user customisation the UI always looked cleaner and more appealing, and it had far better social tools, providing a better experience all round.

There's probably a lot of people on here who don't remember MySpace and Geocities, but restriction of UI customization was a huge FB advantage. The former proved that users cannot be trusted with foreground and background color control. Not to mention autoplaying music applets.

Facebook always did and still looks super technical to me. It's not as visual as the average website. It has so many different windows/sections on every screen. And the settings portal has like 100 layers.

I'm not sure MySpace ever really knew what it wanted to achieve, other than providing a lot of inventory for ads.

Very little effort went into ever evolving the user experience beyond a v1, the backend underpinning it all was legendarily bad, and there was no concept of ad personalization whatsoever.

MySpace kind of stumbled across Music as a product direction, and developed something that was a bit like an ahead of its time version of Soundcloud, but discovery was still horrible and by then people were migrating to Facebook anyway.

Facebook's success was its real names policy & emphasis on friends. What can be simpler than using real names to connect with your friends instead of arbitrary usernames?

This created strong network effects, accelerated by seeding in universities (places with lots of friends).

The tech stuff allowed them to maintain their platform, it didn't differentiate the fundamental proposition.