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Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, w

Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. It's funny, because I've always felt Facebook was a huge improvement over MySpace for exactly this reason. Now, reading this article, I thought "Wait a second, have I gotten it backwards? Crazy adventures do sound more fun than clinical suburbs." On the other hand, what people did with the old MySpace was actually pretty terrible, and maybe this is just tapping into GeoCities nostalgia. I don't know, the jury's still out. But, here's one issue: the freedom and low barrier to entry of GeoCities led to a lot of basic and poorly thought out designs. Many were not really "designed" at all, and that certainly led to some wacky surfing safaris. One reason that things have homogenized is that we've developed a much stronger expectation for how websites should look and act. But, these are complex to design and develop - well out of reach of the average individual - so we glom onto template services that provide a nice design and out-of-the-box functionality: comments, social, CMS, etc. And yeah, most sites on the respective platforms look relatively the same. In order to break that, there's going to be a necessary degradation in sophistication. Which is fine with me, I'm down for the punky DIY vibe. But, this quote worries me a little: And we have great CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and a new, even simpler one that Scott O'Hara is working on called Ground Floor, that makes web sites look pretty good even if the designer doesn't use or understand CSS at all. What's everyone's #1 criticism of Bootstrap websites? They all look the same. What happens if this turns into BootstrapCities?

freehunter 13y ago
To all of your points, I say: who cares? Who care if everyone uses Bootstrap? Who cares if no one does, and it all looks terrible? You know why Geocities was both popular and ugly? It wasn't all because it was 1995, it was partly because we were 15 years old and we were having fun experimenting with everything we could get our hands on. Your comment takes this site way too seriously. I'd like to read your critical analysis of the challenges faced by a civil engineer trying to make a feasible plumbing system in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit.
- resu_nimda 13y ago
  I guess I need to learn how to talk about things in-depth without looking like I really really care about them. Because I don't. I just thought about it a bit. But, ostensibly, the creator cares, because that was a big part of his post. He decried Facebook and similar platforms for fostering a "uniformity and blandness rival[ing] something out of a Soviet bloc residential apartments corridor," then went on to promote Bootstrap, which is subject to the same pitfalls. I just wanted to explore that trade-off between sophistication and originality in today's websites. I still think it's a great idea, and judging from what I saw on the browse page, people are carrying the experimentation/sandbox torch pretty well.
egsec 13y ago
Remember, on the web content is king. The problem with most social media is that its a lot of crap content, that no one would preserve. Would you even want a historical dump of your facebook wall history? Facebook is designed so you will create current-related content to drive relevant ads for what you want now. It removes the effort to thinking and proofing even something like a Xanga or Live Journal. Even with the rise of "easy" CMS systems like drupal or joomla, there is still a large hurdle to entry. Neocities fills that gap for those who don't want to worry about what is going on under the web page, and is going one step past the pendulum swing of jekyll, pelican, etc. This seems like a path in the right direction to allow people to put stuff out in public which may be niche and may not be just word-content like on a free blog system like blogger.
j45 13y ago
Personally, I think BoostrapCities is a great name and idea. Everything has a starting point, or for which bootstrap is enough, and can be the launch point to extend elsewhere. :)

freehunter 13y ago

To all of your points, I say: who cares? Who care if everyone uses Bootstrap? Who cares if no one does, and it all looks terrible? You know why Geocities was both popular and ugly? It wasn't all because it was 1995, it was partly because we were 15 years old and we were having fun experimenting with everything we could get our hands on. Your comment takes this site way too seriously. I'd like to read your critical analysis of the challenges faced by a civil engineer trying to make a feasible plumbing system in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit.

resu_nimda 13y ago
I guess I need to learn how to talk about things in-depth without looking like I really really care about them. Because I don't. I just thought about it a bit. But, ostensibly, the creator cares, because that was a big part of his post. He decried Facebook and similar platforms for fostering a "uniformity and blandness rival[ing] something out of a Soviet bloc residential apartments corridor," then went on to promote Bootstrap, which is subject to the same pitfalls. I just wanted to explore that trade-off between sophistication and originality in today's websites. I still think it's a great idea, and judging from what I saw on the browse page, people are carrying the experimentation/sandbox torch pretty well.

egsec 13y ago

Remember, on the web content is king. The problem with most social media is that its a lot of crap content, that no one would preserve. Would you even want a historical dump of your facebook wall history? Facebook is designed so you will create current-related content to drive relevant ads for what you want now. It removes the effort to thinking and proofing even something like a Xanga or Live Journal. Even with the rise of "easy" CMS systems like drupal or joomla, there is still a large hurdle to entry. Neocities fills that gap for those who don't want to worry about what is going on under the web page, and is going one step past the pendulum swing of jekyll, pelican, etc. This seems like a path in the right direction to allow people to put stuff out in public which may be niche and may not be just word-content like on a free blog system like blogger.

j45 13y ago

Personally, I think BoostrapCities is a great name and idea. Everything has a starting point, or for which bootstrap is enough, and can be the launch point to extend elsewhere. :)