Melodrama!

In 2004, I was an undiagnosed neurodivergent teenager who had given up on trying to fit in. It felt like everyone was trying to mold me into their version of perfect by chastising me when I did something “wrong.” It was confusing, exhausting, and demoralizing. I managed to make a few friends in high school who seemed to just get me, but the last thing I wanted to do was talk about how I felt — until all my friends started signing up for blogging accounts on Melodramatic.com.

Shielded by the anonymity of a screen name, it was the first time I felt safe talking about my mental health — and discovered there were so many other teenagers like me who felt the same way. Even all these years later, if you search “Melodramatic.com” on Reddit, you’ll still find people reminiscing about it on occasion, some retelling the story of how they met their spouse on the site or how they literally would not be alive today if it wasn’t for being able to share their pain with others in a Melo blog.

Most people have never heard of Melodramatic.com. It was such a niche site that it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. Most of Melo’s active user base — which peaked around 300,000 “Melo kids,” as we called ourselves — was in parts of Orange County and the Inland Empire in Southern California. “We were big in Guam, too,” the site’s creator, Sara Robertson, tells me. 

Robertson coded and maintained the site almost entirely on her own. She was a kid when she started coding in the late ’80s, self-taught on a Commodore 64 and a book on BASIC that were Christmas presents from her grandmother. Then, it was on to coding for BBS communities in the ’90s, which set her up to create a personal blog that would eventually become Melodramatic.com.

“I was 18 years old when my best friend died. I had to write about it,” says Robertson. But in the late ’90s and into the mid-2000s, there really weren’t places online where someone dealing with an immense amount of grief could express themselves or find support from a community of people. “Nothing existed at the time that filled that void,” she explains. “Nothing that connected me with people who felt the same shit and made it safe for me to talk about my shit in a judgment-free zone.”

Melo launched years before Myspace, Reddit, and Tumblr and around the same time as Blogger, LiveJournal, and Open Diary. Blogs did exist in the late ’90s, but most were individually created by programmers like Robertson and usually didn’t have a comment section. But Robertson wanted to connect with other people, so she added one to her blog. Almost immediately, her posts started filling up with replies.

“People would say, ‘My friend died, too, and here’s the story of how that happened,’” says Robertson. But they weren’t just strangers offering drive-by sympathies. Over a short period of time, Robertson and the others became a close-knit community — the exact kind of online space she couldn’t find before she started blogging. One of her friends noticed the potential for it to turn into something greater, to give more people their own space to express their truest, unfiltered emotions. They convinced her to add a chatroom (a message board system called The Wall) onto her site and let people create their own accounts.

In the beginning, “nobody joined to say good shit,” Robertson says. A website named Melodramatic.com sets a specific tone, so emotionally loaded topics were the norm. But as Roberston explains, “When you are your authentic self, it tends to attract other authentic people, and it builds communities.”

By the time I signed up for a Melo account, Robertson had already transformed the website again, from a chatroom to a full-fledged social network with top 10 lists and an entire social reward system. The Wall was still around, but it felt more like an extra feature of the site. Most of the time, the only people still chatting in it were the same ones who found Robertson’s blog years earlier. The main page had adopted a simple purple and black color scheme with boxed-in sections, like News and Top Members, that made it easy to navigate. 

Reddit may have made the karma system famous, but Melodramatic.com had it before Reddit even existed. Certain actions, like being the first person to leave a message on a new user’s guestbook, awarded different amounts of points. “People would race to welcome the new users, and that alone made it a different kind of experience,” Robertson explains. When you were the first person to comment on a user’s guestbook, which was called their “g-spot,” you got points for being a “cherry popper.”

There were a few reasons to stock up on karma, too. Earning “touches,” which was the same as pressing a Like button on someone’s post or comment, was one of them. “Touches weren’t free on Melo,” Robertson says. “They were based on your karma, and you only had a certain amount that you could use every day, which made them more meaningful.” A “bang” cost 10 touches.

This was all a shock to me when I first joined. You’re welcoming me? You’re happy I’m here? The cognitive dissonance was surreal at first; total strangers were being nice to me online. That sort of thing wasn’t something I’d experienced, as much as I can remember, offline. It wasn’t long before I started doing the same to other new users, and after a while, I stopped doing it for karma and did it because it was a nice thing to do.

Another big incentive was earning enough karma to “unlock your colors,” or the ability to change the background and text colors on your profile. You could even change the Melodramatic.com logo at the top of every page. You couldn’t clog your profile with unreadable, stylized text and auto-play music like you could on Myspace, but it was enough to make your space reflect your personality.

My Melo went through many color changes during the years I was active on the platform, and since all it required was a little knowledge of HTML, I was also able to add a pop-up window with a custom message that greeted people any time they visited my page. Other users did the same, some with funny messages, but most I saw were heartfelt. Mine was a quote from Hellen Keller: “The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.”

By the early 2010s, Robertson’s labor of love had grown too popular and too expensive for her to continue self-funding. All the merch, fundraisers, and Elite subscriptions that offered users additional features weren’t enough to pay the server bills. “I was gainfully employed and making good money, but you can’t carry a $2,500 a month hobby for the rest of your life,” she says.

She resorted to putting ads on the site to try and bring in more money, but they felt inappropriate next to the kind of things people often wrote about, like cutting themselves or contemplating suicide. It didn’t take long for Roberston to remove ads entirely. “Advertising wasn’t the right solution, but for a social platform, that’s your only option,” she says.

Her server also couldn’t always handle the user base as it grew. “I had 15 years of blog post comments, billions of rows in the database,” she says. “It had accumulated for so long that it was unwieldy, and the technology wasn’t really there at the time.” The site would occasionally crash, and Robertson would spend a couple days trying to get it back up — until one day, it went down, and she never brought it back up. She told herself that she’d “do it this weekend,” but the weekend turned into a week, then turned into two weeks, and then turned into years. Robertson says she never made a conscious decision to shut Melo down. It just sort of happened.

I ask Roberston, who now has her own children, if she has come across anything like Melodramatic.com in recent years or if a place like it could ever exist again. She doesn’t think so. TikTok and Twitter (prior to Elon Musk’s ownership) are places where she’s found similar communities and energies, but recreating or finding a niche community like Melo on today’s internet is much, much harder.

“I have to think of it from the perspective of my kids,” says Roberston. The internet is more dangerous today — a content-hungry, money-driven, predatory kind of space. Mega platforms like Facebook, with their financial incentives, are not in a place to solve it. “You can’t monetize self-expression.”

Today’s internet feels too big and too public for another Melodramatic.com to exist, and yet it feels as essential an idea as ever. Robertson points out that everyone goes through identity challenges. It’s the nature of being human. I agree. I needed a place that wasn’t a diary hiding under my mattress to trauma-dump everything my teenage self was trying to process. I needed a safe space, a judgment-free zone, and a place that offered anonymity. Melodramatic.com gave me all three.

“It makes me happy to walk down memory lane and be reminded that there was a fun world that I was a part of,” Robertson tells me.

I tell her it makes me happy, too. I’m not sure I’d be here today without Melo.