The Founder of GeoCities On What Killed the 'Old Internet' (gizmodo.com) 55
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo, written by Jody Serrano: In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection often operated as if it were perpetually out of breath. Thus, unlike my childhood friends, it was near to impossible for me to watch videos, TV shows, or listen to music. Far from feeling limited, I felt like I was lucky, for I had access to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about anything I wanted to know -- which in those days was anime -- the majority of which was conveniently located on GeoCities. For all the zoomers scrunching up their brows, here's a primer. Back in the 1990s, before the birth of modern web hosting household names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn't exactly easy or cheap to publish a personal website. This all changed when GeoCities came on the scene in 1994.
The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today's Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. "HotSprings" was dedicated to health and fitness, while "Area 51" was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.
Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers -- named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on -- instead of neighborhoods. [...] We can, however, ask GeoCities' founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the '90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion," Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. "It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge." When asked to share his thoughts on the internet of today, Bohnett said: "... The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn't about what you had to eat and where you've traveled. [...] It wasn't anything about your face." He added: "So, what has surprised me is how far away we've gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It's so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. [...] I've been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we've seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok."
Bohnett went on to say that he thinks it's important to remember that "the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we're not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber?"
"We're still in that trajectory where there's going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities," added Bohnett. "I'm very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It's so exciting to see where we might go."
The company gave anyone their own little space of the web if they wanted it, providing users with roughly 2 MB of space for free to create a website on any topic they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its offer, creating their own homemade websites with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files, and Comic Sans. Unlike today's Wild Wild Internet, websites on GeoCities were organized into virtual neighborhoods, or communities, built around themes. "HotSprings" was dedicated to health and fitness, while "Area 51" was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up focus on users and the content they created, a mirror of what the public internet was like in its infancy. Overall, at least 38 million webpages were built on GeoCities. At one point, it was the third most-visited domain online. Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.
Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers -- named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on -- instead of neighborhoods. [...] We can, however, ask GeoCities' founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs. Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the '90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion," Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. "It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge." When asked to share his thoughts on the internet of today, Bohnett said: "... The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn't about what you had to eat and where you've traveled. [...] It wasn't anything about your face." He added: "So, what has surprised me is how far away we've gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It's so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. [...] I've been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we've seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok."
Bohnett went on to say that he thinks it's important to remember that "the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we're not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber?"
"We're still in that trajectory where there's going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities," added Bohnett. "I'm very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It's so exciting to see where we might go."
Facebook killed the Internet (Score:5, Funny)
... then changed its name to "Meta", because it has metastasized.
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lol I'm stealing that
What killed the old internet (Score:5, Insightful)
This is how markets work. They consolidate over time as winners and losers get picked and products get more complex. You can make for a bit of competition with Anti-trust laws if you're willing to enforce, but your not likely to go back to bespoke pages anymore than we're going to go back to making our own Altair computers from scratch.
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but your not likely to go back to bespoke pages anymore than we're going to go back to making our own Altair computers from scratch.
Both of which sound very appealing to me.
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but your not likely to go back to bespoke pages anymore than we're going to go back to making our own Altair computers from scratch.
Both of which sound very appealing to me.
Yes and I'm sure to you the Nomad sounds better than the iPod, the Nokia N900 better than the iPhone, desktop Linux better than macOS/Windows. From a technology standpoint I agree, but users don't care about the technology, they care about the application of that technology to do the job they need done. End users don't care whether the phone call is happening over a wire, 3G, 4G, 5G or magic pixies so long as it works and nor should they. Otherwise they end up spending more time trying to get things to work
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Do people still use iPods? Why? Doesn't pretty much everyone already carry a cellphone with all of a standalone music player's capabilities plus infinite more? What's the point?
Re:What killed the old internet (Score:4, Informative)
Might I interest you in the Gemini protocol? Gemini space is small and has a pretty great community. I would recommend the Lagrange [github.com] client as it not only speaks Gemini, but also Titan protocol [communitywiki.org] (much like POST in HTTP but it's own protocol since Gemini doesn't have anything similar to POST), the Spartan protocol (Gemini mandates TLS, Spartan is Gemini without the TLS requirement and a few other changes), the Finger protocol [wikipedia.org] which is used by a lot of people in Gemini space to indicate their current status, and of course the Gopher protocol [wikipedia.org] from which the Gemini protocol draws as the source of inspiration.
Plenty of sites I recommend. I would link them but Slashdot does not handle gemini:// links well. So here they are in a code block.
Station, a kind of BBS where you can post a message and everyone sees it. - gemini://station.martinrue.com/
Night Fall City and Midnight Pub, both are places for posting all kinds of ideas, poems, etc. - gemini://nightfall.city/ gemini://midnight.pub/
Konpeito, a collection of lo-fi music. The project ended in the winter of 2022 but the music is still there. - gemini://konpeito.media/
Geddit, an anonymous kind of Reddit. - gemini://geddit.glv.one/
CAPCOM, a Gemini space aggregator. - gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/capcom/
Antenna, gemlogs sign up with it, and when the logs change this place puts the change on their feed. - gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
Mozz, a kind of playground of all things Gemini (and Spartan) - gemini://mozz.us
SmolZINE, a zine for things Gemini related. - gemini://gemini.cyberbot.space/smolzine/
Gemini-news, headlines from Google news. - gemini://gemini-news.com/
Gemipedia, a CGI gateway that provides an interface to Wikipedia from Gemini protocol. gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/wp.cgi/
Chilly Weather from Mission Control, a pretty decent weather site for Gemini. gemini://gemi.dev/cgi-bin/chilly.cgi
Perhaps you will join us? Maybe find all kinds of new stuff out there or even start up your own server. The protocols are all very simple and can be easily implemented if you're riding on the back of an already established TLS library.
Re: What killed the old internet (Score:5, Insightful)
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The issue is largely that most people don't want to do page design, or can't do it. So they go to a site like youtube, twitch, twitter, facebook, tiktok, instagram, etc. where they can just type and click.
Of course, if you want to create and distribute content then why would you go to all the trouble of creating and maintaining a content delivery service when you could just use one that already exists and spend your time creating more content?
When I built my most recent PC I didn't then think "ok I have to do some 3D modeling, I guess I'll write an operating system and then write a 3D modeling program and then do the work I need to do", I use what already exists because it does what I need it to do.
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I know what you're saying, but think of the obvious reductionism and incentives it also creates. I want to express my emotional response, so all I want is a frowny face/happy face. Why should I have to construct complex sentences and process my emotion with any system 2 thinking? I mean there are sites that allow me to express just this (ala like buttons). If everything is too easy, we end up with skill-less people who use advanced systems but don't understand those systems or their outcomes.
The problem
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I want to express my emotional response, so all I want is a frowny face/happy face. Why should I have to construct complex sentences and process my emotion with any system 2 thinking? I mean there are sites that allow me to express just this (ala like buttons).
Right but that doesn't eliminate the ability to express it in other ways. Sure there is a button, or there is the emoji as a comment or there is the ascii art that we always used to do :( or there is the ability to write your thoughts out.
Heck, even if you think those are special cases, think of the costs of a traffic light vs stop sign. Traffic lights have big costs- they require electricity, they require tuning, they require someone to change the bulbs, etc. While stop signs require none of that.
Because the two things arent equivalent.
If everything is too easy, we end up with skill-less people who use advanced systems but don't understand those systems or their outcomes.
But why does somebody who simply wants to deliver content need to build their own content delivery system and understand how a content delivery system works? Sure if the existing content delivery systems are inadequate then that make
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TL/DR: I think you think systems means the underlying structure, like code, while I mean something more like systems thinking, like how adding more sugar to food is likely to increase addiction to said food. The fact that this systems thinking means you should be able to apply known past outcomes to predictions of the future. 3D modeling software that is subscription based has a different business model than open source--understanding the systems that generate the code (e.g. the business model) is importa
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If I say "I want a traffic flow control" that makes them both possible solutions.
No because it depends on the specific situation, nobody ever just says "I want traffic flow control", that's far too abstract because you have different solutions for different traffic control problems and you choose the right tool for the job.
Why does someone who wants to move fast need to get a drivers license and understand the rules of the road?
"Answering" a question with a completely different question means you don't have an answer to the original quesion but I'll try again:
why does somebody who simply wants to deliver content need to build their own content delivery system and understand how a content de
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Those people are certainly free to go their own way, nothing is stopping them but they are not people who *do* they are people who just sit ther and *complain* that other people dont do things they way they think they should be done. By all means build a better system, except even *you* dont believe that is feasible and/or worth doing otherwise you would do it.
Actually, I do build many of my own systems when I think there is something to be gained by it. Long ago I supplied source code for those systems until sourceforge started infecting installers with their own code. I admit that is a few years past. Since then I actually have chosen not to use many of the new systems. I do use youtube, but I've never had a facebook account for example. I believe the cost-benefit is isn't worth it. In fact I'd suggest it probably is bad for society, but I don't think my
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I use youtube to distribute content, sell me on why I should build/maintain all of the systems and infrastructure myself versus using what already exists.
Agreed. I've seen several people I follow on youtube state to move to their new platform to view them. Within a month or two, they are back.
It's not just that the system is easy to use, it's where the audience is.
I wish it wasn't that way - and don't want to only have google suggest content to me - and I have tried to switch to whatever platform they suggest but if there is no app or notifciations to inform me when new content is availble, I lose tract of their sites and forget.
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It's a cultural thing as well. There are still lots of very basic websites built by hobbyists in Japan. They look like something from the 90s, all iFrames and text. I like the aesthetic, it's simple and functional without being ugly.
I think the difference is that Japanese people RTFM. They are more willing to learn how to make a simple website, and will often search out a book explaining it. Books are still very popular in Japan, as well as "mooks" that are a cross between a magazine and a book.
Sadly some o
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Even if you did have decent HTML skills, shared hosting plans always did a really terrible job of making it easy to upload and maintain your site. Don't even get me started about even the simplest PHP/MySQL system. It's UNIX all the way down, where you really need to know the ins and outs of filesystem security to get anything to run, and even if package managers can be used, you can't use them on a shared hosting plan since admin privileges are needed to install anything. Nothing is hardened, and even a
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Ease of access destroys just about anything.
Yup. The state of driving is a clear example. Automatics have allowed the incompetent and indignant ease of driving to the detriment of the rest of us.
Re:What killed the old internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Human beings often focus on the worst of everything because life is pretty crap for most of us but there are lots of little Oasis that were ignoring because of our bias for focusing on the crap
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It also lowers the barrier to entry. There's a huge amount of content out there that just wouldn't exist if not for the ease of creating it.....there's people teaching the right way to play musical instruments. There's stack overflow helping people learn how to program. There's a hundred sites explaining mathematics and 100 different ways and somewhere out there is a kid stuck on something who needs one out of that 100 different ways to understand and isn't getting it from his extremely overworked teacher.
I think the biggest loss would be for people that made money on manuals (like the Dummies series). Except for highly specialized stuff (that doesn't change quickly over time), youtube videos are good enough for most repairs and guides.
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More like the bias of marketing crap. My web searches (YouTube, Google, whatever) aren't as good as they used to be 20 years ago.
Yeah, there's plenty of gems out there, but it's clear that sites want to push recommendations over you making your own searches, and as a result the quality of manual searches has been going way down for a while.
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I don't think so.
HTML generators have been around since almost always. And if you generated some static website with NetObjects or similar and uploaded it to GeoCities, you didn't have to worry about hackers, as long as you managed to keep your password secret. Hackers were the problems of the server operators.
Yes, if you installed a webserver on the machine below your desktop and hooked it to the 'net without firewall.... but that's not what geocities was about.
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Exactly Netscape had "Composer" in the geocities era. Nobody need to know HTML to use it.
You basically need to know what a file was, what a web browser was, and what upload means.
The people talking about how FB lowered the barrier to entry might be right but the barrier was already so lower making it lower was / is only harmful. Barriers and gatekeeping are really important! Yes there needs be a way to get a foot hold for new entrants but something happened over the last 20 years or so where this odd idea
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Facebook and youtube took people's desire to be seen and removed any barriers to that. Unfortuantly, that is understandably a lot of people publishing content.
Even leaving ego out of it, if you are making content to help people, you will want to put it somewhere that will have the max audience.
I hate that 90% of user content is either facebook, reddit, or youtube. We are handing over a lot of power to a few corporations (and I don't think it would be any better handing that power to the government). That sa
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These days hardly anyone hand crafts HTML, they all use content management systems. Makes sense, it's the content you want to build, not the nuts and bolts. Also makes it easier for anyone to use the system without learning HTML and CSS.
Unfortunately most CMS systems are complex to deploy and learn, which drives people towards services that off them pre-installed and configured. I use Koto because it's simple and easy for generating static sites: https://github.com/kuro68k/kot... [github.com]
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Is the "old internet" really dead?
As you said, "only a few hobbyists wanted it".
Now I'm not sure that's entirely true. I knew some people that in the late 90s/early 0s had their own webpages, and weren't the type one would expect to do that sort of thing. Yet they started learning HTML or at least managed to use one of those chinsey old website builder tools. Their content wasn't that far from the stuff one sees on social media today though and they did stop with the "techie stuff" when social media became
Waiting for that one Anon (Score:3)
Not quite how I remember things.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Pardon me if I'm stepping on some toes here? But I came from the BBS era, before the Internet was in widespread use at all. When people I knew got Internet access, it was dial-up to a Unix shell account, typically provided by an area college or university. Everything was done via ftp, telnet or apps like Veronica or Archie (all text based). Eventually, some people got fancy and connected up with programs like "Slip" so they could use their own locally install MS-DOS applications over the connection for mail, Usenet reading and so forth.
When we got to the Internet era of services like Geocities? Most of those pages were slapped together, gaudy looking things, created by people who couldn't be bothered to learn how to code a proper HTML page or use one of the early WYSIWYG tools to "roll their own". Typically, I'd see Geocities sites for small businesses and shops who just wanted a "shingle" hanging up on the net someplace to tell people they existed. Some would be a single page giving the company address, phone number, and a single photo of their storefront (and those were often the best-looking ones, since they didn't go crazy with blinking text in cartoon-y fonts! and bright background colors). Other people tried to use it for their own photo galleries ... a task done far better with other web tools like Flickr, as those emerged.
I don't recall Geocities sites as bastions of great content or collaboration, really? It was a popular service in the early days of the Internet. But it was typically your more tech-savvy hobbyist types who provided the better-looking, more usable and useful sites to visit. (And eventually, the "big guys" came along and got most of the eyeballs with sites like Facebook.)
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So I think part of the issue is that the content you get usually derives from the tools and the conventions of the medium and what is easy to do. was pretty easy to do. :D
What has mainly changed has been the monetization of mass data collection. Kids these days say they want to be influencers and twitch streamers. So they want to be ad people basically.
So the demographics of the internet, what is and isn't possible, and peoples' motivations and capabilities are vastly different.
BBSs by their very nature
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blink was pretty easy to do.
We vs. Me (Score:5, Insightful)
The old internet was about "we" -- sharing passions with others. Today's internet is "me, me, me."
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Re:We vs. Me (Score:4, Interesting)
Difference was the reason you posted things. Back then it was about explaining about the things you hade an interest in, be it star wars, growing (legal) herbs or music trivia. Today it is mostly about shouting on the top of your lungs about things you mostly disagree with.
So for all intents and purposes the old web got essentially absorbed into Wikipedia (and offshoots like wookiepedia).
The rest of the web is one of three things, commerce (which still is shoehorned to this day), megaphones (News, Youtube, Facebook etc) and arguments (forums).
And to think, in my young days of yore I had to pay 2 quid an hour to have an argument. Fun times those... :D
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And to think, in my young days of yore I had to pay 2 quid an hour to have an argument. Fun times those... :D
Yeah but you got to have an argument with actual facts and considered opinions being presented. Even the trolls often either provided some insight or ended providing a opportunity for some better informed person to dismantle some common fallacy and disinformation.
Today someone comes a long and says 'racist/bigot/*phobe" or whatever the latest watch word is and 100 morons pile on without the faintest clue about the issue, its not an argument its a shouting matching. A good argument is worth 2 quid, what we
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Advertising changed incentive structure (Score:5, Insightful)
This then lead to SEO, and other tricks, which just meant that the good content, written by people who were not at all interested in promotion, got lost in the pages of Google Search Results
If all this wasn't enough, social media & Digital Marketing provided another source of revenue. People could get paid for simply being charming and pushing products. Which then led to the whole influencer deal
At some point after this, political parties figured out “Hey we can use the same tricks influencers are using”. And they did, with wonderful results.
If there is an incentive to misuse something, then people will misuse it. And so the internet is no exception
Yeah, about geocities (Score:5, Informative)
"with web counters, flashing text, floating banners, auto-playing sound files"
Yes, that's why I avoided geocities sites like the plague it was...
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-- from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10
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I had three and a half of those (used marquee over blink) on my geoshitties page, only dodging floating banners. I did have frames to compensate though!
it's still there (Score:2)
Much of the old stuff is still there, even usenet. There are still ftp sites. People still make simple static webpages for sharing information. Lots of it is no longer hosted, but a hell of a lot of that is on the internet archive anyway.
David Bohnett's rose colored glasses (Score:5, Insightful)
Geocities sites were ugly with god awful design.
And it had its fair share of extremist, racist, and just plain pants of head retarded content too.
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Geocities sites were ugly with god awful design.
And it had its fair share of extremist, racist, and just plain pants of head retarded content too.
The big difference is that Facebook, Twitter, et al, are pushing their extremist and racist content. You had to go to an extremist Geocities site.
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Geocities had a Altavista / Google middleman pitching the content. Facebook etc have merely removed it. That's not a difference, that's just a progression that comes with advancing technology. The result in either case was and is that those who want(ed) this content could get it.
"It's so fractured these days for people to find" (Score:2)
I'm sorry, but that statement is utter garbage. Totally false.
There's communities for everything imaginable under the sun - and a great deal of them, exist in an invite only state - and they aren't necessarily websites!
But from an internet perspective, communities are everywhere - heck, Reddit for starters.
YouTube can also be considered as such - sure, it's owned by a huge corporate, but Geocities was hardly any different for its time.
Th
Migrated to Discord (Score:2)
Fantastic Archive (Score:2)
Glad GeoCities was archived before its demise (Score:2)
Glad GeoCities was archived before its demise.
Sad that AOL Hometown, members.aol.com, and GNN were never archived before their demise.