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To be fair, there is a lot of information available at our fingertips nowadays, much more than anything we could get in the 90s. Information back then was scat
by jfim 6y ago
To be fair, there is a lot of information available at our fingertips nowadays, much more than anything we could get in the 90s.
Information back then was scattered, the tools to look for it (Altavista, Yahoo, Archie, Veronica, etc.) were rather weak in retrospect. Wikipedia didn't exist in the 90s, nor did GitHub, Thingiverse, and so on. A lot of things like online banking, stock brokerages, bill pay, video chatting, online gaming, and so on weren't as good as we have it now. None of that was accessible without being tethered to a phone or Ethernet jack.
What has changed is the arrival of platforms that started optimizing for engagement, impressions, views, clicks, targeting, and eyeballs, because all of that can be monetized.
The people who would be glued to the boob tube now are glued to social media, and instead of getting content fed from Rupert Murdoch and other media barons, it comes from whomever does a better job of paying for ad impressions, gaming social media, and creating clickbait content to get their viewpoint heard.
- qwertox 6y agoI agree, yet I miss platforms like Geocities, where, with no intention of harm, you could create an anonymous site and just write about your hobby. That's no longer possible nowadays. The website counter was the like-button of those days.
- jopsen 6y agoWhat is stopping you?
- xwdv 6y agoHaving to choose where to host it, what blog engine to use, write your own static site builder or go with something prebuilt, which analytics solution, what to name the site, how to SEO optimize your content, picking keywords, using keywords, how to create a newsletter, how to moderate comments and filter spam, what CDN to use, how to build a responsive design for mobile, put a GDPR disclaimer, write a privacy policy, how to display tasteful ads, where to display social media sharing icons, which affiliate campaign provider to go with, gzip or br encoding, jpeg or webp images, what url structure to use, what meta tags, how to title a page, test the rendering in different browsers, picking a font, finding a fast font provider, polyfills, minimize JS file size, picking stock images for articles, promoting your blog post on HN, gaming HN to get some upvotes, coming up with things to write about... fuck this.
- ceesharp 6y agoYou don't have to do most of those things if you just care about writing and creating a hobby site, which geocities was used for.
- iamstupidsimple 6y agoSuch a strawman. Getting Geocities scale traffic is easier than ever - it's just a much lower proportion of total internet usage. Raw HTML still works, just like it did on Geocities. As for advertising... well, if you're going to start making money then expect to brush against regulations. At the very least, you may interest the taxman.
- jfim 6y agoThere's still Neocities [0], and you can make things that look straight from the 90s [1][2] or upload things that look more modern. [0] https://neocities.org/ https://neocities.org/ [1] https://gifypet.neocities.org https://gifypet.neocities.org [2] https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse