6 ms·

The Death and Life of Great American GeoCities

46 points by Thevet 12y ago

leppr 12y ago
Oh, I thought we'd moved on to the 2000s? I was just about to post an old collection of MSN and AOL portal screenshots on my tumblr. That was close. Any idea around when the 2000s will be in-vogue? Some of my case studies indicate it should have begun already. My baseline is 1000 notifications a post so call me when it's time please.
- moron4hire 12y ago
  I don't know if I should up vote you or down vote you. I agree that articles like this one are a pain. They are pitching a misplaced nostalgia. The "good ol' days" weren't good. Even then, we knew that these sites were bad. We just didn't know what else to do. I used to be torn on the Tumblr blogs that create the content that ends up in articles like this. On one hand, link-baity articles that keep hammering on one subject, over and over again, wouldn't exist without them. But on the other, I understand that need to explore and create things, even things that aren't a good aesthetic. I did an entire series on taking cellphone photos of prisms that had lasers passing through them. Hundreds of photos that were mostly junk. But there was something in there that I couldn't articulate, and the process of posting helped me figure it out. I did it for the same reason I played Sudoku for a year straight, but haven't touched it again in 7 years: I had a need to figure it out. It's one of the reasons why I think there is no meaningful distinction between art and science. Your brain subconsciously recognizes that something is there, gets snagged on it, and you use the tools at your disposal to test, test, test and figure it out. I know very few working, successful (even if marginally so) artists who make exactly what they want. Most of them are trend following on how the market reacts, and they aren't exactly cognizant of the precise elements that make their work popular. It's our fault for continuing to buy it. But regardless, I also don't think it deserves such a flippant reply. HN gives you all the characters you could want to write a reply.
  - leppr 12y ago
    Well you probably should have up voted me but it's my fault for being unclear about my opinion while trying to be funny. I don't think that this aesthetic is stupid or anything, it's only that what's represented in this article is the same kind of content you would see when tumblr had almost just been created. People were very attracted to these aesthetics, some focusing more on the uncanny aspects while others presented a more quaint and nostalgic picture. It gave rise to a whole plethora of visual and even musical sub-genres. People developed sometime very fine and subtle aesthetics. Reading this article makes me feel the same way an average HN'er would feel reading a 2015 article praising the merits of that new paradigm shift called Object Oriented Programming. You would expect at least one or two sarcastic comments. Even *ing Rihanna 'borrowed' the style 3 years ago [1]. And we're talking about the most mainstream US singer since Michael Jackson. Still I know techies aren't exactly the most art-voracious demographic so maybe I'll try to dig up some google stats to prove my point. [1]: http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-seapunk-beef-saturday-night-live-video/ http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-seapunk-b... (2012)
    - sp332 12y ago
      The aesthetics of Geocities was admittedly pretty questionable :) But it is still interesting. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
      - moron4hire 12y ago
        There is no accounting for the amount of time I spent trying to pick the perfect background music for the websites I built in the late 90s. It never occurred to me that you'd even want a silent site. But, I guess that's the nature of youth. We're supposed to be a bit embarrassed of ourselves, or else we never grew.
      - icebraining 12y ago
        Thanks for that link. Fun memories.
mattwad 12y ago
Not sure this was intended, but I'm on a bus wifi, and the background sky image is loading one row at a time, feels more reminiscent of that time than the animated images.
rachetandplank 12y ago
Great headline, but there is not much to the article. I clicked around for a few minutes thinking I missed something. Am I an idiot?
- omgitstom 12y ago
  Nope, thought the same thing. I had an awesome Duke Nukem 3d site on geocities. It had gameplay tips, easter eggs, and tips and tricks on how to build your own maps and scripts for Duke Nukem. This may have been my first attempt at programming, and was easily my first glimpse into network protocols
- snorkel 12y ago
  The page itself uses the garish late 90's web design gimmicks, but the article has amusing links in the sidebars to other galleries.
sp332 12y ago
Deleting Geocities was a horrifyingly destructive act by Yahoo. They took thousands of sites that had been built by other people and just deleted them all. And this isn't an isolated incident. The industry seems to think that taking gobs of user data and trashing it is fine, and it happens on a regular basis. We need to change the culture of the tech industry to view users' data as belonging to the users. Until then, consider donating to the Internet Archive https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/
- yurymik 12y ago
  That's an awful move by itself, but what I personally cannot get over is their decision to rick-roll every user who clicks on the outdated link. That simply insulting. Here's a random example: www.geocities.com/scythemantis
  - tsomctl 12y ago
    What the fuck. They are literally rick-rolling people. And Yahoo is a publicly traded, supposedly reputable company. Also, I thought the Internet Archive was mirroring Geocities. Why don't they redirect people there, with a legal disclaimer, or just give the Internet Archive the domain name. There is so much additional baggage with the name, Yahoo could never reuse the name for something else.
- slg 12y ago
  Yahoo gave plenty of warning and allowed users to export their data (I didn't use it so I can't say how complete or easy the export process actually was). What else would you like them to do, keep the sites up indefinitely?
  - sp332 12y ago
    That's one option. Geocities in particular was a bit over 1TB, so it wouldn't have been too expensive to host it read-only. Or they could send the data to an archive like IA.
    - 12y ago
coding4all 12y ago
If you miss GeoCities, try http://neocities.org/ http://neocities.org/
tnuc 12y ago
My very first website was on GeoCities. After a while my site got too popular so I moved to paid hosting. It did a fantastic job for what I needed it for and was surprised that Yahoo managed to completely fuck it up.
kyledrake 12y ago
Edit: I have turned this into a blog post: https://neocities.org/blog/we-are-the-future https://neocities.org/blog/we-are-the-future
- rubikscube 12y ago
  This is nice. It would be helpful to have an RSS feed on the main blog. RSS is still widely used too!
brudgers 12y ago
Olia Lialina's work on the terabyte of Geocities that was salvaged [you might want to turn down your speakers]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
serve_yay 12y ago
It's not really for me but I'm not a big fan of this stuff. I went to a JS conference recently and a whole day of it was devoted to "LOL marquee tags and 3D text GIFs". Silly me, I thought we'd talk about writing code.
symlinkk 12y ago
"Vaporwave" music and art is all about those late 90's and early 2000's graphics and sounds. If you're interested in this stuff you should check it out: https://www.tumblr.com/search/vaporwave https://www.tumblr.com/search/vaporwave

46 points by Thevet 12y ago

leppr 12y ago

Oh, I thought we'd moved on to the 2000s? I was just about to post an old collection of MSN and AOL portal screenshots on my tumblr. That was close. Any idea around when the 2000s will be in-vogue? Some of my case studies indicate it should have begun already. My baseline is 1000 notifications a post so call me when it's time please.

moron4hire 12y ago
I don't know if I should up vote you or down vote you. I agree that articles like this one are a pain. They are pitching a misplaced nostalgia. The "good ol' days" weren't good. Even then, we knew that these sites were bad. We just didn't know what else to do. I used to be torn on the Tumblr blogs that create the content that ends up in articles like this. On one hand, link-baity articles that keep hammering on one subject, over and over again, wouldn't exist without them. But on the other, I understand that need to explore and create things, even things that aren't a good aesthetic. I did an entire series on taking cellphone photos of prisms that had lasers passing through them. Hundreds of photos that were mostly junk. But there was something in there that I couldn't articulate, and the process of posting helped me figure it out. I did it for the same reason I played Sudoku for a year straight, but haven't touched it again in 7 years: I had a need to figure it out. It's one of the reasons why I think there is no meaningful distinction between art and science. Your brain subconsciously recognizes that something is there, gets snagged on it, and you use the tools at your disposal to test, test, test and figure it out. I know very few working, successful (even if marginally so) artists who make exactly what they want. Most of them are trend following on how the market reacts, and they aren't exactly cognizant of the precise elements that make their work popular. It's our fault for continuing to buy it. But regardless, I also don't think it deserves such a flippant reply. HN gives you all the characters you could want to write a reply.
- leppr 12y ago
  Well you probably should have up voted me but it's my fault for being unclear about my opinion while trying to be funny. I don't think that this aesthetic is stupid or anything, it's only that what's represented in this article is the same kind of content you would see when tumblr had almost just been created. People were very attracted to these aesthetics, some focusing more on the uncanny aspects while others presented a more quaint and nostalgic picture. It gave rise to a whole plethora of visual and even musical sub-genres. People developed sometime very fine and subtle aesthetics. Reading this article makes me feel the same way an average HN'er would feel reading a 2015 article praising the merits of that new paradigm shift called Object Oriented Programming. You would expect at least one or two sarcastic comments. Even *ing Rihanna 'borrowed' the style 3 years ago [1]. And we're talking about the most mainstream US singer since Michael Jackson. Still I know techies aren't exactly the most art-voracious demographic so maybe I'll try to dig up some google stats to prove my point. [1]: http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-seapunk-beef-saturday-night-live-video/ http://www.spin.com/articles/azealia-banks-rihanna-seapunk-b... (2012)
  - sp332 12y ago
    The aesthetics of Geocities was admittedly pretty questionable :) But it is still interesting. http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/
    - moron4hire 12y ago
      There is no accounting for the amount of time I spent trying to pick the perfect background music for the websites I built in the late 90s. It never occurred to me that you'd even want a silent site. But, I guess that's the nature of youth. We're supposed to be a bit embarrassed of ourselves, or else we never grew.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Thanks for that link. Fun memories.

mattwad 12y ago

Not sure this was intended, but I'm on a bus wifi, and the background sky image is loading one row at a time, feels more reminiscent of that time than the animated images.

rachetandplank 12y ago

Great headline, but there is not much to the article. I clicked around for a few minutes thinking I missed something. Am I an idiot?

omgitstom 12y ago
Nope, thought the same thing. I had an awesome Duke Nukem 3d site on geocities. It had gameplay tips, easter eggs, and tips and tricks on how to build your own maps and scripts for Duke Nukem. This may have been my first attempt at programming, and was easily my first glimpse into network protocols
snorkel 12y ago
The page itself uses the garish late 90's web design gimmicks, but the article has amusing links in the sidebars to other galleries.

sp332 12y ago

Deleting Geocities was a horrifyingly destructive act by Yahoo. They took thousands of sites that had been built by other people and just deleted them all. And this isn't an isolated incident. The industry seems to think that taking gobs of user data and trashing it is fine, and it happens on a regular basis. We need to change the culture of the tech industry to view users' data as belonging to the users. Until then, consider donating to the Internet Archive https://archive.org/donate/ https://archive.org/donate/

yurymik 12y ago
That's an awful move by itself, but what I personally cannot get over is their decision to rick-roll every user who clicks on the outdated link. That simply insulting. Here's a random example: www.geocities.com/scythemantis
- tsomctl 12y ago
  What the fuck. They are literally rick-rolling people. And Yahoo is a publicly traded, supposedly reputable company. Also, I thought the Internet Archive was mirroring Geocities. Why don't they redirect people there, with a legal disclaimer, or just give the Internet Archive the domain name. There is so much additional baggage with the name, Yahoo could never reuse the name for something else.
slg 12y ago
Yahoo gave plenty of warning and allowed users to export their data (I didn't use it so I can't say how complete or easy the export process actually was). What else would you like them to do, keep the sites up indefinitely?
- sp332 12y ago
  That's one option. Geocities in particular was a bit over 1TB, so it wouldn't have been too expensive to host it read-only. Or they could send the data to an archive like IA.
  - 12y ago

coding4all 12y ago

If you miss GeoCities, try http://neocities.org/ http://neocities.org/

tnuc 12y ago

My very first website was on GeoCities. After a while my site got too popular so I moved to paid hosting. It did a fantastic job for what I needed it for and was surprised that Yahoo managed to completely fuck it up.

kyledrake 12y ago

Edit: I have turned this into a blog post: https://neocities.org/blog/we-are-the-future https://neocities.org/blog/we-are-the-future

rubikscube 12y ago
This is nice. It would be helpful to have an RSS feed on the main blog. RSS is still widely used too!

brudgers 12y ago

Olia Lialina's work on the terabyte of Geocities that was salvaged [you might want to turn down your speakers]: http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/ http://contemporary-home-computing.org/1tb/

serve_yay 12y ago

It's not really for me but I'm not a big fan of this stuff. I went to a JS conference recently and a whole day of it was devoted to "LOL marquee tags and 3D text GIFs". Silly me, I thought we'd talk about writing code.

symlinkk 12y ago

"Vaporwave" music and art is all about those late 90's and early 2000's graphics and sounds. If you're interested in this stuff you should check it out: https://www.tumblr.com/search/vaporwave https://www.tumblr.com/search/vaporwave