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.
Those people would have been more tuned in, since it was the early days of the Web. But in terms of technical skills? Throwing up a very simple Geocities page was about as much effort as starting a blog on Blogger. Easier than fiddling around with Wordpress most of the time.
It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).
>> not like geocities was gonna let you hook up to a SQL database.
Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.
I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.
> the types of nontechnical people in 1999 that were online were miles ahead of today's nontechnicals.
I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
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.
I can't speak for others, but for me it's not a matter of dividing people in the way you describe. It's more about deciding who my audience is. If I talk to someone about my latest programming project, the conversation is completely different if it's someone who has never done programming before, versus someone who also does programming, versus someone who uses the same technologies as I do.
A website that requires the user to write HTML code targets an audience that knows HTML. That's really all there is to it. But knowledge of HTML correlates extremely strongly with knowledge of CSS and JavaScript and a couple other internet basics, so it's not labeled “people who know HTML”, it's labeled “tech people”.
What you see as defeatist I see as recognizing reality. I consider myself nontech and I run a few webapps-- if you don't see it as a useful distinction let me connect to your live database, I dare you :)
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 miss stumbleupon quite a bit. There are similar services but the web itself just doesn't seem to function the same so the websites don't quite hit the same.
Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.
>It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.
The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.
I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.
Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.
one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!
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.
I'm in the same boat. I think i was geocities.com/Soho/???? right when it came out. I had Red Sox trivia questions, and it was multiple choice. The wrong answers linked to wrong.html, and the correct answer linked to 1.html, then 2.html etc. Fun times being a kid on the information super highway.
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.
> With this launch, and our recently deployed 11-datacenter global anycast caching CDN, Neocities becomes a world-class web hosting service, proving you can still make building a web site fun and easy without sacrificing performance, and without being forced to figure out how to use esoteric, expensive cloud services.
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).
Aside: the first time I put some data in a database table, and built a page to display it in the browser is one of those head exploding moments from my life.
I'm pretty sure it was MS Access, classic ASP (there were... 4? objects total to learn?) and IIS Express.
I don't know. There are kids making games in Roblox now, editing movies and doing all kinds of things, but Hacker News would still consider them "nontechnical" because they have social media accounts.
A website that requires the user to write HTML code targets an audience that knows HTML. That's really all there is to it. But knowledge of HTML correlates extremely strongly with knowledge of CSS and JavaScript and a couple other internet basics, so it's not labeled “people who know HTML”, it's labeled “tech people”.
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...
https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities
Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.
The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.
I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.
Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.
one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!
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. :)
https://web.archive.org/web/19991001193925/http://www.geocit...
It was so exciting to find a new comment in your guestbook
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 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/
- [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.
https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities
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.
That idea seems to be coming back.
Geocities inspired site available today.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445618
> With this launch, and our recently deployed 11-datacenter global anycast caching CDN, Neocities becomes a world-class web hosting service, proving you can still make building a web site fun and easy without sacrificing performance, and without being forced to figure out how to use esoteric, expensive cloud services.
https://blog.neocities.org/blog/2017/03/26/huge-space-increa...
https://status.neocities.org/
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.