
Why the ‘Weird Internet’ of the GeoCities Era Had to Die - jasoneckert
https://onezero.medium.com/why-the-weird-internet-of-the-geocities-era-had-to-die-383f2870662c
======
vikramkr
The weird internet went away not because people on the internet became boring,
but because the internet opened up to non weird people. The article talks
about how complicated it can seem to build your own site now, but it's easier
then ever to build your own website - the whole point is that the internet
isn't necessarily dominated by the types of people that are willing to put in
that kind of work anymore. Its not like there are some mysterious new barriers
preventing you from building a custom site on the internet that have been
thrown up now. This post itself didn't have to be on medium - but medium and
Facebook and YouTube deliver that "boring, non weird" audience that you want
to read your stuff.

~~~
jsgo
> but it's easier then ever to build your own website

Is it though? When I was 9, I created a site on Angelfire (and loved the fact
that the default page was this craptastic html example where you could view
source and kind of learn various html tags relating to lists, tables I
believe, and various other things as a quick primer for those uneducated in
HTML). I also created one on Geocities (different use cases in the end, but
more or less I just wanted to see which was better/easier. Ended up with
Angelfire as my main one as you could actually "name" your site as opposed to
the generic "city"/"street" name-ish thing of Geocities). And if memory
serves, there were other hosts that were similarly popular too. One iirc would
allow for subdomains instead of the nesting that Angelfire/Geocities does, but
if I believe by default they would have big branding somewhere on your page.
Tried it, think there was a work around for that one, but I didn't like
battling it so didn't retain.

Now, sure, I can find a host that I can pay $x to host the HTML that I build
outright, but I don't know if kids coming up have the same resources I did as
it relates to starting up a free site and having a default page with various
HTML elements (too many at this point for a single page to be of value. Would
probably have to look something like W3Schools or whatever with a list on the
left you could go through).

Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I first
got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still around
which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called
Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it
began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the
Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are posted
of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
Back in 1996 a friend of mine with no computer training put together a simple
website in Notepad and uploaded it to free web space provided by her ISP.

That doesn't happen today. People bumble along with Wordpress or services like
Wix, but the customisation options for non-experts are very limited and
generic.

Hosting has become much more complicated and confusing, and the web simply
doesn't do simple any more. Even a small blog is a moderately complicated
project, especially if it uses a build system. And building even a minimal
independent commercial site requires very specialised skills and plenty of
time.

There really isn't anything equivalent to AF/Geo. And even if there were, CSS
and HTML - never mind js - are now so complex beginners can't just pick them
up by dabbling.

~~~
mikeash
There are still free hosts out there, and the simple HTML of yesteryear still
renders fine today.

~~~
jsgo
> Maybe they exist, but they weren't as obvious as they were then. When I
> first got online, I found a site that at least a few years ago was still
> around which was this chat site called 4-lane with the one I went to called
> Chatterbox. People would link to their pages hosted on Angelfire, and so it
> began. Now, everything is custom domained so it is hard to locate the
> Angelfire of today. If you blog, I guess there is Medium that links are
> posted of pretty regularly, but outside of that, I don't notice.

followed by later:

> I just mean organically though. Hate to sound old, but back then, Yahoo was
> basically a nested index and Google if it was a thing at that point wasn't a
> commonly known one. Yet Angelfire, Geocities, etc. were easily located
> because sites hosted on them were shared so heavily and drop the
> /something/something (edit: from the URL) and it says "hey, you can create
> your own for free here".

> I just did a search for "free website" and there was Wix, Wordpress, Yola,
> and Weebly. Going to assume those are legit, but the rest of my results
> (which were way more common than those 4 entries) were offshoots of
> "[best/top/10] web site builders 2019" or some random other ones that won
> the SEO game.

------
HocusLocus
People experience the dismal anti-literate Twitter (concept and style and non-
member popup 'experience') and think it's... normal?

And the Twitter embed system is hilarious at times. There is nothing as face-
palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded in a news article describing
it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a news article with a tweet-not-
available hole.

Facebook, where you are 10 narrow screens and 1500 back-end js-directed cloud
bloat loads loads away from something you saw yesterday? The Modern Web where
even scroll keys do not really work anymore?

Or for that matter Youtube, whose text comments are designed to explode into
illiterate mush with no hint or hope of proper spaces or paragraph breaks if
copied to clipboard? Predatory.

Here we are in the 21st century where people take SCREENSHOTS of things rather
than copy information. This is regression, devolution.

Back in the dark ages of 2000 it was considered bad manners to design a system
that appeared to scroll endlessly until the web browser simply gummed up and
crashed. Search engines wouldn't bother to render any of that. Now it's the
preferred way to do it.

And now Google is replacing their results page text stream paragraphs with
tile-crap that is rects within rects with acres of white space, and less
context.

If only the whole Internet was built like Hacker News.

~~~
chriswarbo
> There is nothing as face-palmy as a controversial tweet that gets embedded
> in a news article describing it and then the owner deletes it, leaving a
> news article with a tweet-not-available hole.

There _is_ something more face-palmy: when the owner spots that they've been
embedded in a news article, and change the post accordingly. The latest issue
of Private Eye gives an example of this happening, where the Mail Online
embedded a Facebook post about a mis-spelled party banner; the poster (Simon
Harris) saw it was being embedded and changed the text:

> For a while, until someone noticed and replaced the linked post with a
> screenshot, the article proudly stated: "The Daily Mail is an utter shiterag
> that is only read by Middle England tossbags who voted Leave because some
> Polish guy called Piotr served them in Tesco, once."

------
FearNotDaniel
Gotta love the implicit ageism in the first para's assumption that the web
already existed when current web developers first got interested in coding. I
wrote my first code on a ZX81, or possibly an Apple II, and I'm still getting
paid to build web applications today!

~~~
dlphn___xyz
same - i had a class in middle school where we programmed animations in hplot
on apple IIe

------
pixelbath
> I still run a personal blog on a custom website I built, but every year it
> feels a bit stranger, and a little rarer. Many people default to Facebook
> Pages or cookie-cutter Squarespace designs, if they have their own website
> at all.

Posted on Medium, which is nearly the Facebook equivalent of a blogging site.
The author mentions Glitch, for which the first step to getting started is
either "clone a project" or start with React, Vue, Ember, Angular, or any
other number of nontrivial frameworks. Is this really the same as HTML/CSS
into Geocities?

For better or worse (feels like worse), Internet users are becoming consumers
of content rather than producers. When this was all still newer (say,
1997-2005), the novelty of having an online presence was still a dominant
factor. As that process has become more homogenized and simplified with the
rise of social media platforms, there's much less incentive to bother with
learning HTML, CSS, and possibly JS just to put some information on a page.
Modern social media platforms walk you through profile creation, posting
interests and having those lead to like-minded people, contact management, and
so on. Everything's just _there_. I think it's a hard sell to try and walk
that back to "just do it yourself" for someone without that mentality, and
it's amusing to see people keep trying. For those of us who value personal
expression over ease-of-use, personal websites will continue to be preferable.

------
type0
> The internet was weirder back then — full of quirky ideas, personal pages,
> custom blogs, and far more viable platforms to build on than we have on the
> streamlined web of today.

The Internet is not the Web, also what platforms? Sure besides Geocities, many
ISP's gave a few MBs for personal html files but for the most part you didn't
had your own URL, now you can have that for a few pennies a month. But we're
not playing web pages game anymore, it's interactivity bit times otherwise we
feel bored without infinite scroll and even a regular forum doesn't cut it
anymore (no one wants no register for yet another one).

> In the last two decades, custom stylesheets have become a dying breed.

I'm not so sure about it, at least not for the regular personal pages, you
just don't find those as often with "the search engine". Try
[https://wiby.me/](https://wiby.me/) to get a feel for it. Maybe we need to
resurrect the gopher protocol and make the search unbiased again, hell yeah,
Make the Search Great Again!

~~~
visiblink
It's strange to say this, since I'm a gopher user and everyone else seems
interested in popularizing or resurrecting the protocol, but I hope that never
happens. Gopher today is a cool, thoughtful, and quirky place. I think that's
because it is a niche. Add the masses and it would be bland-ified.

------
AndrewStephens
The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp
the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much
harder.

Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some
simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same
page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based
layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens.

Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was
very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like
potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you
and provides a nice network effect.

If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to
make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough
that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of
Facebook likes and comments.

Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to
complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.

~~~
al2o3cr

         simple table-based layouts
    

Nobody who ever used table-based layouts for anything of substance would
describe them as "simple".

Back in those days, websites would regularly specify a minimum screen size
(800x600 and 1024x768 were popular) and woe to anybody with a smaller
display...

~~~
WorldMaker
Back in the day to get things like "nice rounded corners" required hacks in
your tables like 1px empty spacer gifs and rounded corner gifs. CSS may seem
less "simple" to learn, but compare it to "borrowing" a copy of Photoshop or
Paint Shop Pro and learning that tool just to get something as boringly nice
as "rounded corners" that you had control over.

(Source: I rebuilt my blog a few years back mostly specifically to make my
90's kid self envious that I could actually do the LCARS things I had wanted
to do back then with no corner gifs or spacer gifs, and in a way that
responsively reflows content that TABLEs never could.)

------
lobotryas
I skimmed the article. It’s reasonable, but can someone please tell how it
explains the “had to die” part of the title or is that just clickbait?

Also to add to what another poster said: after Eternal September (if there was
ever a milestone for this) most people on the internet become just regular
users. Therefore the internet’s offerings evolved to cater to this majority.
That’s ok (I guess). In my opinion the biggest issue is centralization. Ex:
want to have a video channel about guns or hacking? Best pound sand because
you don’t have a spot on the biggest video platform that currently exists.

~~~
type0
Some kind of fad of writing to end your title with "... had to die", to me it
just indicates that such articles have this sloppy writing style.

One of the subtitles was "Growing up". The Web didn't "grew up" it just became
old and we still can't figure out how to use it, hopefully when WASM becomes
the standard everyone can live happily.

Centralization is what everyone is familiar with. All those giant social media
channels are like tv channels of the past, the Web has never gotten to it's
true potential and who knows if it ever will.

~~~
tannhaeuser
I don't know if WASM, of all things, will help the web evolve. WASM comes
straight from a programmer's/nerd's desire for portability, performance, and
"optimal" programming languages (eg choice of PL, reuse of code) above all,
but doesn't do anything for content. In fact, it makes browsers and web
development even more complex and certainly doesn't take the web into the
direction of GeoCities of old.

~~~
type0
Sorry, my mentioning of WASM wasn't intended to be taken seriously *(should
have used /s). I know equal number of people who would be happy as well
unhappy about it.

------
filmgirlcw
TikTok is the weird internet for kids today the way GeoCities was for those of
us who were kids in the 90s.

The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other communities.

~~~
Japhy_Ryder
> The internet is still weird. It’s just shifted to apps and other
> communities.

Nah. It's wannabe weird.

------
chasing
The Internet's still pretty weird. It's possible that it's just weird in a way
that's not nostalgic for those of us who cut our teeth on the late-90s /
early-00s Internet.

~~~
george_morgan
Yes. I think many in their 30s and older have missed the new reality.

That more culture is being created on the internet on mobile platforms and
apps they've never heard of (and in languages they don't speak) than ever
before.

The weird web is alive but it lives in TikTok and WeChat etc.

------
rchaud
I think what's missing in discussions over the death of the old web, is that
people fundamentally want their work to be seen, or discovered. The weird web
thrived when there weren't many websites out there, and discovery was as easy
as being listed in a web directory like what Yahoo! had. You could "surf" them
one by one like you can with cable TV.

That ended in the early 2000s as search engines prioritized their own news,
sports and entertainment content (Yahoo and MSN especially) and the explosion
of blogs made keeping sites in a directory totally un-scalable.

As others have said, the weird web exists on channels like Vine (rip),
Youtube, TikTok etc, but the discovery UX is bad because there are so many
people trying to show up on your home screen. So the result is most of the
content is very standardized, because people want to be seen, and doing what's
popular is the 'reliable' way of achieving it.

------
xrd
I misread this quote at first:

"For many developers, figuring out how to do something cool on their Myspace
page or building a GeoCities site full of animated “under construction” GIFs
was the genesis of their tech careers."

I read it as "apex of (my) tech career." It felt like everything since then
has been a slow decent into disappointment.

Everything feels so rigid now. Back then it was just fun. Feels like every
thing I make now is loaded with anxiety about future changes and scalability
and code rot. Tragic that this is gone for me.

------
nerdymishka
The weird part of the web still exists. neocities.org is a more modern
geocities with the same ability to experiment and modify a static page that
geocities had.

You just need to dig deeper and promote parts of the weird web on the new
gateways like reddit, facebook, etc.

------
abdulmuhaimin
the internet and computer now is much too important to let
bug/glitch/exploits/hacks gets away.

I dont think there will ever be bug that will become accidental feature like
how Myspace was.

------
gottam
And we've traded it for a sea of advertising and astroturfing.

------
vincent-toups
Love to see someone trying hard to say "capitalism sucks" but not knowing how.

