
Ask HN: What Was Geocities.com? - thescribbblr
Came across this website name when i was reading about sites that was acquired by Yahoo.com
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leshokunin
Geocities was a service people used to make web pages. It was one of the first
places online where people got an Internet presence. People used it to make
pages about themselves, their families, their pets, and their hobbies.

It didn't require any coding skills, and you could make a little page and
suddenly be on the Internet. Back then, search engines were very basic, so
there was this common idea of needing to have your domain, your site (both
words being used traditionally to describe land and property), so you'd have
presence. A more recent analog Myspace, where people could have a profile,
show off what they liked, these kinds of things.

Fun fact: the entire Geocities archive was saved by a bunch of fans (I saw
them at DWeb Camp this summer) and is below 500Gb - so it can fit on an SD
card!

There's also a fan effort to recreate the experience of Geocities, called
Neocities. It has a bunch of fan pages that will give you an idea of what
Geoticies was like.

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thescribbblr
Thank you so much your comment really answered my query. I am also more
curious to checkout NeoCities.

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shams93
I was on their pre-ipo team back then I was nearly fired for bringing a linux
laptop to work in 1998 linux was as bad to bring to work as say a bag of weed
they assumed I was trying to hack my own employer pretty funny considering how
dominant linux is today but back then everyone swore by Sun Solaris.

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72deluxe
I remember some Geocities websites being horrendous in their appearance,
making use of the "rainbow" animated horizontal ruler.

TBH I miss this era of the Internet when pages loaded fast even on slow
computers (although Netscape was very fussy about its HTML). The past 20+
years of "progress" have just seen more and more JavaScript and unnecessary
bloat loaded for pages, with very little content on them. Giant fonts, lots of
fading-in of content, lots of scrolling required. It's pretty poor!

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ZguideZ
For many of us, Geocities was an introduction to having a personal website and
building community through the internet. Personally, I wish the old geocities
sites were still accessible. Believe it or not - since this was before search
engines (really) and wikipedia (really) many geocities sites were treasure
troves of links that led to a world of information.

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hn17
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geoci...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961226152953/http://www1.geocities.com/)

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ZguideZ
Ha! The internet was better back then. Thanks for this...too bad it only goes
a couple of links deep...

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ZguideZ
I used to spend a lot of time with the kooks because conspiracy theories used
to be fun instead of dangerous -
[https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocit...](https://web.archive.org/web/19961220171417/http://www.geocities.com/Area51/)

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athiercelin
I feel old for having the answer...

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thescribbblr
Seriously?

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davidjnelson
Free website hosting popular in the nineties.

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thescribbblr
Just like wix? But why it was popular?

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flukus
A bit like wix a bit like dreamweaver/frontpage and a bit like myspace rolled
into one, free hosting and an applet based WYSIWIG editor. Also a bunch of
components like chat, guestbooks, webrings, etc. The also had a virtual
community concept, with street addresses so you had neighbors and things like
that. In retrospect that was a terrible idea, but maybe the analogy helped
some less technical people.

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thescribbblr
So it provided some way to insert components like we see today or you can
write html code as it is and the page gets created?

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albatros2ko
there is a modern version of geocities, you can see what sites used to look
like back in Web 1.0
[https://neocities.org/browse](https://neocities.org/browse)

geocities was the most popular way of having your own personal website back in
the day, people were making websites for fun and you can see it in the sites
and pages they created, overflowing with personality and quirks.

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thescribbblr
Woah dude! I checked NeoCities and i got hooked up, checked the featured
websites. So, my general question why Yahoo closed the Geocities?

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thescribbblr
How the website were created? Through direct html code injection or something
else

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obrajesse
Really?

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thescribbblr
Didn't get exact answer to my question. As my English is not good, the
articles in English didn't help me with my question.

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obrajesse
What’s your native language?

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thescribbblr
Hindi

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gaspoweredcat
and now i feel old

