This came up the other day and it became clear that many people, even on HN, don't realize that in the late 90's it was pretty common for non-tech people to have their own websites. There were many places where you could do this for free, and it was extremely easy to spin up a simple one. The actual content being shared - text and images - isn't really different from the majority of the content that's still being shared.
In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.
If you think of technical and nontechnical as a spectrum, the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.
And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.
Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.
Yes, the only substantial change to the web's usability (genuinely useful apps like maps excepted) has been addition of streaming video that just did not work all that well in the nineties. Everything else has been mostly fluff. The period of so called "Web 2.0" and the subsequent proliferation of SPA and framework wars around them has felt particularly pointless. In this regard the birth of useful LLMs is a bit of a fresh air in the tech sector in that it feels like something novel has emerged that isn't just an nth way of dynamically spitting out HTML.
I absolutely abhor this idea that there are "tech people" and "non tech people". It's complete defeatest bullshit. When I was 12 years old setting up a website in 1997 I was not a "tech person", I was someone curious and motivated enough to learn a very simple skill (html). There's nothing special about me. We don't talk about "bread people" and "non bread people," we just talk about people who decide to learn to make bread. There are not "driving people" and "non driving people" there are those who have learned to drive and those who haven't. I'm sick of this stupid divide. You either care to learn a skill or not.
One thing nobody remembers (or at least never writes about in these retrospectives) from the early days of Geocities is you literally had to virtually "walk" up and down "blocks" in the the "neighborhoods" to find a "vacant lot" to put your site in. When I initially tried to sign up, they had some beta of a "vacant lot finder" cgi form that didn't work. It wasn't like these days where you just sign up and get an account - there was scarcity and a bit of a hunt.
I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space.
I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.
It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.
I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.
Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
My first website was effectively a wiki on different races from Star Trek.
It was plain text.
With a few pages eventually having an image and it was just stiff said about them in the original series, next generation and eventually ds9.
It was terrible but I miss the excitement of people getting in touch with the other details and episode references I had missed out or didn’t know about.
Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.
I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD
Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.
I’m so sad that my page[0] never got archived… I started it in 1997, a few years before Yahoo bought it, and I think at some point I didn’t migrate the account or something, and it went away before anyone was really archiving anything on geocities.
- [0] geocities.com/Colosseum/Loge/3484, I’ll always remember the URL. It was a Detroit Red Wings slash Jimi Hendrix slash Smashing Pumpkins slash Star Wars fan page I made in 7th grade. I just kept putting more stuff on there.
My first foray into "programming", or at least something programming-adjacent, was getting the book "Make Your Own Web Page - A Guide for Kids!"[1] at a Scholastic Book Fair at my school. It was actually a pretty decent introduction to HTML, considering it was written for children in 1998, and it got me interested in learning a lot more about computers. "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make, but when I realized that I, an actual child, could make a website, it was one of those "the world is different" moments.
When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway.
I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything.
Nowadays this type of static site is insanely cheap to host. Put a CDN like CloudFlare (which it seems they are using) in front of this type of site and you could scale to millions of hits basically for free.
I remember trying to learn html when I was 12 in order to make my geocities page.
I thought it was so cool that I could add the little counter for the number of visits to the bottom. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those on a website.
If you miss the quirky, personal touch of early web pages, NeoCities (https://neocities.org) might just bring back those memories, with a similar DIY ethos and vintage design.
GeoCities was the place you’d go to if you didn't have access to an Internet account with web hosting. I had a page there, don’t remember the location at all. Search wasn’t a priority.
At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.
GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.
Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]
it's probably a knee jerk reaction to the horrendousness[0] that MySpace allowed users to do to their pages which was just a follow of some of the bonkers designs from GeoCities.
One of my first part time jobs was as a "pornzapper" for Tripod, one of Geocities' competitors.
We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.
I made my first couple of websites on GeoCities back in 1997 for my 2 favourite tv shows at the time: Xena and The X-Files. I wish they had been archived somewhere. I remember how watching the visitor counters go up into the tens of thousands for each one of them felt like an enormous accomplishment, like I had peaked in life. Good times.
I was exploring Angelfire a few years ago to see who still used it and was surprised by the number of Navajo/Dine.
I learned more about bingo and reservation culture, language, and society over that few days than I had in my entire life. Vastly enhanced my understanding of Letterkenny.
How big would the entire geocities db have been? A few gigabyes? Can't be much larger than wiki. db I guess only Google still have a relatively completel archive locked away somewhere after they removed cached viewing.
I might quantify by saying that one really nasty thing was to block archivers from at least saving content/context
I'm pretty angry with a lot of what Yahoo did. It's very idealistic to frame it in words like this but it's almost like "Companies should be owned by people who have a strong understanding of what makes a company valuable, its users"
Not true. The Internet grew up on the day that GeoCities died. It had to go out there in the corporate madness and try to get a job. A sad reality of life.
I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoths they are today. Social media platforms wouldn't exist as we know them, or possibly at all. ISPs would've been forced to offer symmetric connections from the start to meet the demand for home servers.
So I see this as an early mistake that snowballed into the cesspool that is the modern web. Things would've been very different, possibly for the better, if we had web publishing tools that were equally as user friendly as the web browser was in those early days.
The original WorldWideWeb browser released in 1991 did have support for WYSIWYG editing of documents, but was quickly overtaken by Mosaic, which was read-only. It would be interesting to know why this feature was abandoned and not iterated upon. The Wikipedia article[2] mentions this:
> The team [at CERN] created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.
That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic.
WebDAV came out a few years later in 1996, but it never really took off. It was seen more as an alternative to FTP, than a native web feature. Why did it fail? Why wasn't it adopted by web browsers? Konqueror seems to have been the only one.
Much later in 2009 Opera launched Unite, a web server inside the browser, which seemed really promising at the time. But it was also quickly discontinued. At that point it might've been too little, too late.
And now we have Web3 and the decentralized movement, and even TBL is trying to undo the damage with Solid. But I have little hope any of these projects will see mainstream adoption. The modern web has too much traction, and the average web user doesn't care enough about their data to change their habits, even if the tools were simple to use.
Anyway, this is possibly too tangential for a thread on GeoCities, but I'm curious if anyone here has more information about this early history of the web. I would love to know TBL's perspective about all of this.
Thank you for the interesting bits of history. I never knew about the planned phase 2, or the other attempts for a more distributed web.
I suspect the reasons why it never caught on were much simpler. Most of the early adopters were very enthusiastic, wanted to contribute, and there were many niches where one could contribute something new. Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition. Even with GUI editors, it is much closer to desktop publishing than word processing. The former never really caught on outside of professional work because it is high effort. Blogs and wikis are more popular, with the effort being closer to word processing. Yet even that is a bit much, given that the very low effort social media seems to be dominant these days.
Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.
gonzobonzo|1 year ago
In many ways, we've actually regressed over the past 30 years, to the point where people say that the average person couldn't even create their own page before Web 2.0. And the web has become much more homogenized as a result, and most of the platforms people gravitate to, starting with Web 2.0, went for quick throw away engagement instead of more thoughtful evergreen content.
p3rls|1 year ago
And there was only so much to learn, too, at least as far as web development went-- not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.
Today I think those types of nontechnical people are pursuing far more lucrative niches in product management, design, ux, marketing and stuff like that over basic webdev work.
abraxas|1 year ago
mvdtnz|11 months ago
Seanambers|11 months ago
kalleboo|1 year ago
I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space.
As far as I can tell the "blocks" were never archived so they're missing from the internet archive. You can see the indexes of them here https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocit...
dangrossman|1 year ago
https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...
selcuka|1 year ago
canjobear|1 year ago
wayne|1 year ago
Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)
relaxing|1 year ago
andvaribekho|1 year ago
https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit...
It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook
nemo8551|1 year ago
It was plain text.
With a few pages eventually having an image and it was just stiff said about them in the original series, next generation and eventually ds9.
It was terrible but I miss the excitement of people getting in touch with the other details and episode references I had missed out or didn’t know about.
JuniperMesos|11 months ago
OldOneEye|11 months ago
Of course, not for the content itself, but because it's really a time capsule of the feelings and hopes of our time, back then, when we were teens, discovering this new exciting thing called Internet, the excitement of meeting like minded people and have discussions that you could never have with your friends.
I feel like nothing is ever gonna replicate that excitement anymore, but that may be more related to us being 40+ than the technology not being available xD
Geocities/Lycos/others, then switching to phpbb forums that you modded and where you had your first programming experiences to try to build games...great innocent times all around, before everything was enshittified for commercial purposes.
pkorzeniewski|1 year ago
I get a warm feeling looking through all these "home pages", they feel so much more genuine and personal than anything found on modern social media.
[0] https://geocities.restorativland.org/
ninkendo|1 year ago
- [0] geocities.com/Colosseum/Loge/3484, I’ll always remember the URL. It was a Detroit Red Wings slash Jimi Hendrix slash Smashing Pumpkins slash Star Wars fan page I made in 7th grade. I just kept putting more stuff on there.
pabs3|1 year ago
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities
pavelstoev|1 year ago
tombert|1 year ago
When I made some awful website with stolen pictures and a lot of awful colors that didn't match (with of course a bright lime green background, obviously), I needed a place to publish my code, and that book recommended Geocities at the very end, and I did. No one ever really went to my site outside of supportive friends and relatives, but it was still a lot of fun to talk to the other kids at my school and brag about how I had my own website. Keep in mind, this would have been around ~1999-2000, I would have been about 8-9 years old. This was before everyone had a MySpace; the fact that I had a website was considered "kind of cool". I thought it was anyway.
I loved GeoCities. I miss the world when everyone had their own awful web pages. Social media made things more approachable, and is in most ways better, but I think something is lost in the centralization of everything.
[1] https://a.co/d/4AYuTSx not a referral link or anything.
aadhavans|11 months ago
That idea seems to be coming back.
alberth|1 year ago
Geocities inspired site available today.
aussieguy1234|1 year ago
deepsquirrelnet|1 year ago
I thought it was so cool that I could add the little counter for the number of visits to the bottom. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those on a website.
Jotalea|11 months ago
bootload|11 months ago
At this point I was working in an Internet startup building client-side side tools.
GeoCities did one thing really well, building pages on the Web. All you needed was a browser. Innovative.
Compare this to downloading, then installing software on a Win95 box. Work on some markup, FTP the HTML, graphics, stylesheets to the server. A hint to the future you’d see in 2003 with WP. [1]
Reference
[1] Wordpress, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress
mcbain_83|11 months ago
486sx33|1 year ago
bcoates|1 year ago
duxup|1 year ago
dylan604|1 year ago
[0] so bad a new word is used for it
outer_web|1 year ago
andvaribekho|1 year ago
It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator
aetherson|1 year ago
We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.
SunlitCat|1 year ago
richarme|1 year ago
drooopy|11 months ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
schlauerfox|1 year ago
Apocryphon|1 year ago
washadjeffmad|11 months ago
I learned more about bingo and reservation culture, language, and society over that few days than I had in my entire life. Vastly enhanced my understanding of Letterkenny.
maxglute|11 months ago
delfinom|1 year ago
alex1138|1 year ago
I'm pretty angry with a lot of what Yahoo did. It's very idealistic to frame it in words like this but it's almost like "Companies should be owned by people who have a strong understanding of what makes a company valuable, its users"
sgt|11 months ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
imiric|1 year ago
So I see this as an early mistake that snowballed into the cesspool that is the modern web. Things would've been very different, possibly for the better, if we had web publishing tools that were equally as user friendly as the web browser was in those early days.
The original WorldWideWeb browser released in 1991 did have support for WYSIWYG editing of documents, but was quickly overtaken by Mosaic, which was read-only. It would be interesting to know why this feature was abandoned and not iterated upon. The Wikipedia article[2] mentions this:
> The team [at CERN] created so called "passive browsers" which do not have the ability to edit because it was hard to port this feature from the NeXT system to other operating systems.
That could be a hint, but it doesn't explain why NCSA didn't implement it in Mosaic.
WebDAV came out a few years later in 1996, but it never really took off. It was seen more as an alternative to FTP, than a native web feature. Why did it fail? Why wasn't it adopted by web browsers? Konqueror seems to have been the only one.
Much later in 2009 Opera launched Unite, a web server inside the browser, which seemed really promising at the time. But it was also quickly discontinued. At that point it might've been too little, too late.
And now we have Web3 and the decentralized movement, and even TBL is trying to undo the damage with Solid. But I have little hope any of these projects will see mainstream adoption. The modern web has too much traction, and the average web user doesn't care enough about their data to change their habits, even if the tools were simple to use.
Anyway, this is possibly too tangential for a thread on GeoCities, but I'm curious if anyone here has more information about this early history of the web. I would love to know TBL's perspective about all of this.
[1]: https://www.w3.org/Proposal.html
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb
II2II|1 year ago
I suspect the reasons why it never caught on were much simpler. Most of the early adopters were very enthusiastic, wanted to contribute, and there were many niches where one could contribute something new. Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition. Even with GUI editors, it is much closer to desktop publishing than word processing. The former never really caught on outside of professional work because it is high effort. Blogs and wikis are more popular, with the effort being closer to word processing. Yet even that is a bit much, given that the very low effort social media seems to be dominant these days.
Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.
musicale|1 year ago
a-dub|1 year ago
i think the bigger challenge was highly available hosting. there were authoring tools aplenty.
ydjje|1 year ago
[deleted]