
The Death and Life of Great American GeoCities - Thevet
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/02/27/magazine/Netstalgia.html
======
sp332
Deleting Geocities was a horrifyingly destructive act by Yahoo. They took
thousands of sites that had been built by other people and just deleted them
all. And this isn't an isolated incident. The industry seems to think that
taking gobs of user data and trashing it is fine, and it happens on a regular
basis.

We need to change the culture of the tech industry to view users' data as
belonging to the users. Until then, consider donating to the Internet Archive
[https://archive.org/donate/](https://archive.org/donate/)

~~~
res0nat0r
Are they just supposed to keep the servers and infrastructure which costs them
money running forever, no matter how unprofitable?

~~~
comex
It's hard to believe that an archive of sites meant to be consumed on dial-up
modems, most abandoned, would today require particularly high bandwidth costs.
Yahoo has been faltering for a long time, but it's still worth tens of
billions of dollars. So yes, I think they should have kept a (read-only)
archive running forever, despite not making any money from it, as an act of
good internet citizenship with respect to such a historically important
website - or at the very least not have forced the Internet Archive to race to
manually crawl as much as possible before the deadline.

edit: As a general note, this is IMO one of the fundamental technical
deficiencies of the Web today. Keeping website information around shouldn't
require active maintenance by the publisher. Imagine if everyone could no
longer read the contents of a book once the publisher stopped printing it -
what that would do to our access to historical culture? In an era where most
users have abundant storage at least by the standards of text, it wouldn't be
that hard to invent a protocol where visitors to websites automatically mirror
them (the text at least) and mirror them to other clients, forming a
decentralized filesystem. Compared to this, the WayBackMachine is an
impressive effort, but it's limited by its centralized nature, managed by a
single, relatively small non-profit organization.

~~~
pc2g4d
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-
peer_web_hosting](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_web_hosting) ?

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rachetandplank
Great headline, but there is not much to the article. I clicked around for a
few minutes thinking I missed something. Am I an idiot?

~~~
omgitstom
Nope, thought the same thing. I had an awesome Duke Nukem 3d site on
geocities. It had gameplay tips, easter eggs, and tips and tricks on how to
build your own maps and scripts for Duke Nukem. This may have been my first
attempt at programming, and was easily my first glimpse into network protocols

------
brudgers
Olia Lialina's work on the terabyte of Geocities that was salvaged [you might
want to turn down your speakers]:

[http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/](http://contemporary-home-
computing.org/1tb/)

------
coding4all
If you miss GeoCities, try [http://neocities.org/](http://neocities.org/)

------
kyledrake
Edit: I have turned this into a blog post: [https://neocities.org/blog/we-are-
the-future](https://neocities.org/blog/we-are-the-future)

~~~
rubikscube
This is nice.

It would be helpful to have an RSS feed on the main blog. RSS is still widely
used too!

------
mattwad
Not sure this was intended, but I'm on a bus wifi, and the background sky
image is loading one row at a time, feels more reminiscent of that time than
the animated images.

------
symlinkk
"Vaporwave" music and art is all about those late 90's and early 2000's
graphics and sounds. If you're interested in this stuff you should check it
out:
[https://www.tumblr.com/search/vaporwave](https://www.tumblr.com/search/vaporwave)

------
serve_yay
It's not really for me but I'm not a big fan of this stuff. I went to a JS
conference recently and a whole day of it was devoted to "LOL marquee tags and
3D text GIFs". Silly me, I thought we'd talk about writing code.

------
tnuc
My very first website was on GeoCities. After a while my site got too popular
so I moved to paid hosting.

It did a fantastic job for what I needed it for and was surprised that Yahoo
managed to completely fuck it up.

------
leppr
Oh, I thought we'd moved on to the 2000s? I was just about to post an old
collection of MSN and AOL portal screenshots on my tumblr. That was close. Any
idea around when the 2000s will be in-vogue? Some of my case studies indicate
it should have begun already. My baseline is 1000 notifications a post so call
me when it's time please.

~~~
moron4hire
I don't know if I should up vote you or down vote you.

I agree that articles like this one are a pain. They are pitching a misplaced
nostalgia. The "good ol' days" weren't good. Even then, we knew that these
sites were bad. We just didn't know what else to do.

I used to be torn on the Tumblr blogs that create the content that ends up in
articles like this. On one hand, link-baity articles that keep hammering on
one subject, over and over again, wouldn't exist without them. But on the
other, I understand that need to explore and create things, even things that
aren't a good aesthetic. I did an entire series on taking cellphone photos of
prisms that had lasers passing through them. Hundreds of photos that were
mostly junk. But there was something in there that I couldn't articulate, and
the process of posting helped me figure it out. I did it for the same reason I
played Sudoku for a year straight, but haven't touched it again in 7 years: I
had a need to figure it out.

It's one of the reasons why I think there is no meaningful distinction between
art and science. Your brain subconsciously recognizes that something is there,
gets snagged on it, and you use the tools at your disposal to test, test, test
and figure it out.

I know very few working, successful (even if marginally so) artists who make
_exactly_ what they want. Most of them are trend following on how the market
reacts, and they aren't exactly cognizant of the precise elements that make
their work popular.

It's our fault for continuing to buy it.

But regardless, I also don't think it deserves such a flippant reply. HN gives
you all the characters you could want to write a reply.

~~~
leppr
Well you probably should have up voted me but it's my fault for being unclear
about my opinion while trying to be funny.

I don't think that this aesthetic is stupid or anything, it's only that what's
represented in this article is the same kind of content you would see when
tumblr had almost just been created. People were very attracted to these
aesthetics, some focusing more on the uncanny aspects while others presented a
more quaint and nostalgic picture. It gave rise to a whole plethora of visual
and even musical sub-genres. People developed sometime very fine and subtle
aesthetics.

Reading this article makes me feel the same way an average HN'er would feel
reading a 2015 article praising the merits of that new paradigm shift called
Object Oriented Programming. You would expect _at least_ one or two sarcastic
comments.

Even __*ing Rihanna 'borrowed' the style 3 years ago [1]. And we're talking
about the most mainstream US singer since Michael Jackson. Still I know
techies aren't exactly the most art-voracious demographic so maybe I'll try to
dig up some google stats to prove my point.

[1]: [http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-
seapunk-b...](http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-seapunk-beef-
saturday-night-live-video/) (2012)

~~~
sp332
The aesthetics of Geocities was admittedly pretty questionable :) But it is
still interesting. [http://contemporary-home-
computing.org/1tb/](http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/)

~~~
moron4hire
There is no accounting for the amount of time I spent trying to pick the
perfect background music for the websites I built in the late 90s. It never
occurred to me that you'd even _want_ a silent site.

But, I guess that's the nature of youth. We're supposed to be a bit
embarrassed of ourselves, or else we never grew.

