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Anyone remember when Geocities was a virtual city with neighborhoods? I remember having to click around a visualization of a neighborhood block, and having to

Anyone remember when Geocities was a virtual city with neighborhoods? I remember having to click around a visualization of a neighborhood block, and having to reserve a homepage. Homepages were limited per neighborhood. Each neighborhood had a name that was part of the URL path to the page. That was very early in Geocities' life, and the artificial scarcity they tried to create didn't last long. But that's the story behind the name "Geocities".

derefr 7y ago
I've always thought it'd be neat to return to that model for modern centralized blogging services (e.g. Wordpress.com). No need for it to be a literal representation of backend sharding or what-have-you; just more of a skeuomorphism. Taking an approach like: 1. Allow everyone to self-assign a neighbourhood when they sign up (not with Geocities' interest-based neighbourhoods, but rather just a set of arbitrary ones, like MMO server shards); 2. Use some distance metric (maybe after your blog has five posts or so to data-mine) to calculate proximity, assigning people "street addresses" within that neighbourhood; 3. Let people know who their digital "neighbours" are, and encourage people to help out their neighbours, send them welcome messages, etc. Maybe invite people to message their neighbours when the neighbour's blog has been inactive for a while, to find out if they're okay. Other cute slice-of-life-y not-at-all-just-ways-to-increase-stickiness things. ;) (#2 would be especially interesting, I think, if new blogs could show up "between" existing blogs, such that one of your previously-most-proximate neighbours is suddenly two spaces down and you have a new even-closer closest neighbour. Without this.)
dangrossman 7y ago
I remember that I learned HTML from http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090 http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090 -- I can still remember the URL, in the Athens neighborhood -- but I haven't seen the actual webpage in 23 years. I'd love to find an archived copy.
- echelon 7y ago
  Anecdotes like this make me so sad at what we've lost. I spent so much of my early teenage years on Geocities, Angelfire, EzBoards, AIM, ICQ. It's all but vanished. We should have done a much better job with preservation. I'm hoping someone will one day bump into un-formatted hard drives from some of these old web hosting companies and resurrect the content. It's weird to feel so much nostalgia for intangible things. It's also weird to reminisce about youth. Despite all of the new tech, and the wealth and career I've built, and the people I've met, I sometimes wish I could relive the early 2000s. It feels like all of the adventure and newness has been sucked out of the world. And then I snap out of it.
  - geocities 7y ago
    "We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history
    - PavlovsCat 7y ago
      > "We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history I wonder if they'll even look back, at all. Even newspapers post articles linking to tweets or youtube, or articles elsewhere, without mirroring anything. Those will be much more useless than pure text articles that at least describe what they reference. Social media, HN, reddit -- so much is just a stream of things. Permanence and curation, something like building a library, those ideas seem rather abandoned.
      - yesenadam 7y ago
        Facebook seems very good at not deleting data...
  - Causality1 7y ago
    I agree with you completely. I miss the days when every website felt like its own solar system, separated by light-years of empty space from all the others. Who you were and what you did on one site had nothing to do with your life on another site unless you went out of your way to make it. When you made a friend somewhere you put them on your instant messenger list and actually talked to them, as opposed to just adding another name to your giant pile of useless Facebook friends. The modern net feels like an endless series of stages with everyone putting on their own show to an uncaring audience instead of real communities. When everything on a website was hosted by the website. I miss when my bookmarks folder had four dozen websites in it that I visited almost every day, instead of five. I used to get news about my interests from ten different sites, now it's just two. I used to get porn from half a dozen places, now it's one. Used to talk to people on five different platforms, now it's maybe two. Used to read over two dozen web comics, now it's just one.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  This is also where I learned HTML! I printed much of the site out on my middle school’s laser printer and kept it in a file folder along with other resources! I would code my HTML on paper in class and then type it up during lunch or once I got home from school. What a time!
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  Wayback Machine has it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020130181017/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020130181017/http://www.geociti...
  - Figs 7y ago
    Older version from 1996 (23 years ago): https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...
filmgirlcw 7y ago
I do! I was in the “Pines” neighborhood of Silicon Valley! I signed up for my first site in 1996 when I was 13. I was a teen “community leader” for GeoCities from 1997 - 1999 (from the ages of 14-16), which basically meant I was unpaid tech support who would answer help emails about using GeoCitied and html and going through blocks in my neighborhood to make sure websites didn’t violate the various community guidelines. In exchange I got more space and a custom domain. The problem is my custom username meant my site was never backed up in the GeoCities archived because when Yahoo moved to usernames, there were issues preserving/indexing sole of the old ones. The Wayback Machine has some of the site but not all of it or the images. I got some free GeoCities stock that became Yahoo stock that became worth $400 a share that my mom wouldn’t let me sell (I was 15 or 16 and it was an etrade custodial account), something that 20 years later I still bitch at my mom about (it was the only time she ever interjected in the managing of my finances). After Yahoo bought GeoCities, they sent out this survey for the CLs to fill out, asking about community and some product things and thoughts on how they could integrate with Yahoo. I sent some detailed response and was asked to get on a conference call to talk more in-depth. The call went really well and they offered to fly me out to Sunnyvale to discuss more in person/maybe look at a job or some consulting. I was obviously excited, thinking they knew I was a teen CL — I was thinking it would be a cool internship or summer job. When they found out I was 16, the conversation ended and looking back, I get the impression they were embarrassed to be taking feedback from a teenager (today, company’s actively seek that out). The teen program was ended shortly after — I suppose someone realized it probably wasn’t legal to have minors policing content. The whole CL program was shut down not long after after someone sued Yahoo for employing unpaid labor. I will always love GeoCities — it was my Introduction not just to building for the web but to online communities in general.
- jhabdas 7y ago
  > Images are copyright and not for use without explicit permission from the owner As a former CL what are your thoughts on this text I just copied off the OP-linked page?
  - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    I'll bet the OP never asked for permission, nor for creating this copy of Geocities.
mighty_bander 7y ago
I do remember that! I even signed up for a page during that time, which I promptly forgot about forever.
hermitdev 7y ago
I dont remember the neighborhoods so much, but I do remember having at least 4 email accounts for geocities to get extra space. For a while, I ran a Civilization 2 mod site on geocities. Been so long ago, dont even remember the account name...
- acjohnson55 7y ago
  LOL. My half-assed Civ 2 mod was one of my Geocities site's "features".
kalleboo 7y ago
I thought I was the only one who remembered that! And there was some experimental "find an empty spot" tool that was just an unstyled form in a /cgi-bin directory, and once you went to the empty spot it found, it was already taken... I got frustrated and gave up, but we soon switched ISPs and the new one gave you 5 MB of hosted space under algonet.se/~username
jes5199 7y ago
my screen-name here contains my address from those days
burlesona 7y ago
That's how I remember it too. I remember hunting around for a while for a good "location" to park my page, and then many hours spent learning HTML. I was about 12 at the time and had a lot of free time on my hands, haha.
bdcravens 7y ago
Yeah, mine was somewhere in the College Park “neighborhood”
matt_j 7y ago
I had a Geocities site in high school (mid 90s) complete with wood panel background, animated gifs (rotating skull, etc), visitor counter, headings with color gradient, blinking text and an autoplay midi file of Hotel California. I'm so sorry. :)
billpg 7y ago
I had GeoCities when it was called GeoPages. Yeah, I'm old!
jl6 7y ago
I do, and I’d love to hear if there was an archive from this era, as this is where my first website was hosted. I didn’t keep any of the files myself so as far as I know it’s conpletely lost.

derefr 7y ago

I've always thought it'd be neat to return to that model for modern centralized blogging services (e.g. Wordpress.com). No need for it to be a literal representation of backend sharding or what-have-you; just more of a skeuomorphism. Taking an approach like: 1. Allow everyone to self-assign a neighbourhood when they sign up (not with Geocities' interest-based neighbourhoods, but rather just a set of arbitrary ones, like MMO server shards); 2. Use some distance metric (maybe after your blog has five posts or so to data-mine) to calculate proximity, assigning people "street addresses" within that neighbourhood; 3. Let people know who their digital "neighbours" are, and encourage people to help out their neighbours, send them welcome messages, etc. Maybe invite people to message their neighbours when the neighbour's blog has been inactive for a while, to find out if they're okay. Other cute slice-of-life-y not-at-all-just-ways-to-increase-stickiness things. ;) (#2 would be especially interesting, I think, if new blogs could show up "between" existing blogs, such that one of your previously-most-proximate neighbours is suddenly two spaces down and you have a new even-closer closest neighbour. Without this.)

dangrossman 7y ago

I remember that I learned HTML from http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090 http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090 -- I can still remember the URL, in the Athens neighborhood -- but I haven't seen the actual webpage in 23 years. I'd love to find an archived copy.

echelon 7y ago
Anecdotes like this make me so sad at what we've lost. I spent so much of my early teenage years on Geocities, Angelfire, EzBoards, AIM, ICQ. It's all but vanished. We should have done a much better job with preservation. I'm hoping someone will one day bump into un-formatted hard drives from some of these old web hosting companies and resurrect the content. It's weird to feel so much nostalgia for intangible things. It's also weird to reminisce about youth. Despite all of the new tech, and the wealth and career I've built, and the people I've met, I sometimes wish I could relive the early 2000s. It feels like all of the adventure and newness has been sucked out of the world. And then I snap out of it.
- geocities 7y ago
  "We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    > "We should have done a much better job with preservation." - and that is exactly it, people in the future will look back and shake their heads at the callousness with which we just deleted early history I wonder if they'll even look back, at all. Even newspapers post articles linking to tweets or youtube, or articles elsewhere, without mirroring anything. Those will be much more useless than pure text articles that at least describe what they reference. Social media, HN, reddit -- so much is just a stream of things. Permanence and curation, something like building a library, those ideas seem rather abandoned.
    - yesenadam 7y ago
      Facebook seems very good at not deleting data...
- Causality1 7y ago
  I agree with you completely. I miss the days when every website felt like its own solar system, separated by light-years of empty space from all the others. Who you were and what you did on one site had nothing to do with your life on another site unless you went out of your way to make it. When you made a friend somewhere you put them on your instant messenger list and actually talked to them, as opposed to just adding another name to your giant pile of useless Facebook friends. The modern net feels like an endless series of stages with everyone putting on their own show to an uncaring audience instead of real communities. When everything on a website was hosted by the website. I miss when my bookmarks folder had four dozen websites in it that I visited almost every day, instead of five. I used to get news about my interests from ten different sites, now it's just two. I used to get porn from half a dozen places, now it's one. Used to talk to people on five different platforms, now it's maybe two. Used to read over two dozen web comics, now it's just one.
filmgirlcw 7y ago
This is also where I learned HTML! I printed much of the site out on my middle school’s laser printer and kept it in a file folder along with other resources! I would code my HTML on paper in class and then type it up during lunch or once I got home from school. What a time!
xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
Wayback Machine has it: http://web.archive.org/web/20020130181017/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020130181017/http://www.geociti...
- Figs 7y ago
  Older version from 1996 (23 years ago): https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocities.com/Athens/2090/ https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...

filmgirlcw 7y ago

I do! I was in the “Pines” neighborhood of Silicon Valley! I signed up for my first site in 1996 when I was 13. I was a teen “community leader” for GeoCities from 1997 - 1999 (from the ages of 14-16), which basically meant I was unpaid tech support who would answer help emails about using GeoCitied and html and going through blocks in my neighborhood to make sure websites didn’t violate the various community guidelines. In exchange I got more space and a custom domain. The problem is my custom username meant my site was never backed up in the GeoCities archived because when Yahoo moved to usernames, there were issues preserving/indexing sole of the old ones. The Wayback Machine has some of the site but not all of it or the images. I got some free GeoCities stock that became Yahoo stock that became worth $400 a share that my mom wouldn’t let me sell (I was 15 or 16 and it was an etrade custodial account), something that 20 years later I still bitch at my mom about (it was the only time she ever interjected in the managing of my finances). After Yahoo bought GeoCities, they sent out this survey for the CLs to fill out, asking about community and some product things and thoughts on how they could integrate with Yahoo. I sent some detailed response and was asked to get on a conference call to talk more in-depth. The call went really well and they offered to fly me out to Sunnyvale to discuss more in person/maybe look at a job or some consulting. I was obviously excited, thinking they knew I was a teen CL — I was thinking it would be a cool internship or summer job. When they found out I was 16, the conversation ended and looking back, I get the impression they were embarrassed to be taking feedback from a teenager (today, company’s actively seek that out). The teen program was ended shortly after — I suppose someone realized it probably wasn’t legal to have minors policing content. The whole CL program was shut down not long after after someone sued Yahoo for employing unpaid labor. I will always love GeoCities — it was my Introduction not just to building for the web but to online communities in general.

jhabdas 7y ago
> Images are copyright and not for use without explicit permission from the owner As a former CL what are your thoughts on this text I just copied off the OP-linked page?
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I'll bet the OP never asked for permission, nor for creating this copy of Geocities.

mighty_bander 7y ago

I do remember that! I even signed up for a page during that time, which I promptly forgot about forever.

hermitdev 7y ago

I dont remember the neighborhoods so much, but I do remember having at least 4 email accounts for geocities to get extra space. For a while, I ran a Civilization 2 mod site on geocities. Been so long ago, dont even remember the account name...

acjohnson55 7y ago
LOL. My half-assed Civ 2 mod was one of my Geocities site's "features".

kalleboo 7y ago

I thought I was the only one who remembered that! And there was some experimental "find an empty spot" tool that was just an unstyled form in a /cgi-bin directory, and once you went to the empty spot it found, it was already taken... I got frustrated and gave up, but we soon switched ISPs and the new one gave you 5 MB of hosted space under algonet.se/~username

jes5199 7y ago

my screen-name here contains my address from those days

burlesona 7y ago

That's how I remember it too. I remember hunting around for a while for a good "location" to park my page, and then many hours spent learning HTML. I was about 12 at the time and had a lot of free time on my hands, haha.

bdcravens 7y ago

Yeah, mine was somewhere in the College Park “neighborhood”

matt_j 7y ago

I had a Geocities site in high school (mid 90s) complete with wood panel background, animated gifs (rotating skull, etc), visitor counter, headings with color gradient, blinking text and an autoplay midi file of Hotel California. I'm so sorry. :)

billpg 7y ago

I had GeoCities when it was called GeoPages. Yeah, I'm old!

jl6 7y ago

I do, and I’d love to hear if there was an archive from this era, as this is where my first website was hosted. I didn’t keep any of the files myself so as far as I know it’s conpletely lost.