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GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

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Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#41

Post by aetherson »

andvaribekho wrote: post #25

Anyone who lived the geocities era should take a look at the game "Hypnospace outlaw" It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator

One of my first part time jobs was as a "pornzapper" for Tripod, one of Geocities' competitors.

We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of service.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#42

Post by krapp »

p3rls wrote: post #40
gonzobonzo wrote: post #38

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 sha…

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, de…

> 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.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#43

Post by gonzobonzo »

p3rls wrote: post #40
gonzobonzo wrote: post #38

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 sha…

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, de…

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).

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#44

Post by bolognafairy »

krapp wrote: post #42
p3rls wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, de…

> 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.

because they don’t use neovim

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#45

Post by geuis »

ipaddr wrote: post #20
chpatrick wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just put it on Cloudflare pages.

Why so 1/4 of the internet can't access your site.

Your comment isn't specifying what 25% doesn't have access. If you mean China being 1/4 the current human population that could be true you need to be more specific.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#46

Post by selcuka »

kalleboo wrote: post #10

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 acco…

There is a partial archive at https://www.oocities.org/

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#47

Post by albeebe1 »

ninkendo wrote: post #27
pkorzeniewski wrote: post #9

You can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0] 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/

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 mad…

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.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#48

Post by pavelstoev »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #9

You can browse through archived GeoCities websites on The Geocities Gallery [0] 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/

I hope to find my page with a listing and reviews of 3D Video Accelerator cards, now known as GPUs. I created this in 1998 while in grade 10.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#49

Post by abraxas »

gonzobonzo wrote: post #38

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 sha…

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.

Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet

#50

Post by geuis »

aetherson wrote: post #41
andvaribekho wrote: post #25

Anyone who lived the geocities era should take a look at the game "Hypnospace outlaw" It's basically a geocities simulator where you play as a moderator

One of my first part time jobs was as a "pornzapper" for Tripod, one of Geocities' competitors. We had a tool called the "fleshfinder" that looked for accounts with lots of images and then lots of those images had lots of flesh tones, and would dump them into a moderation queue where we human pornzappers would glance over the images and then press a button to terminate their account or mark it as within terms of serv…

This sounds like "first internet job" kind of experience. Would love to hear how you got the job and any other stories you have to share.

My first was 1999 in Florida. Dude had a shop selling jewelry on eBay. His autistic brother (not kidding, dude's brother LOVED computers and our first conversation was him telling me how to deal with himself). Very introspective but really cool guy to get to know.

The owner had a small team of Vietnamese jewelers working in the shop to make and customize jewelry. There was no scamming going on. I had to work on photography of new items and to update the eBay listings. If a customer had a problem with the jewelry they received, we would correct it for free and send it back.

The downside is that despite running a legit business, the owner was an asshole and just kept kicking out one employee after another. Including half the jewelry team.

After a few months I even quit because he just started randomly bitching and physically threatening me because the focus on a couple pieces of jewelry was slightly off. Easily a 10 minute fix.

My last day when he did this again I told him to fuck off and I was out. I still vividly remember him physically spitting from his mouth on my driver side window as I rolled it up as a pulled away.

Now that I think about it, fuck you Jeremiah. Like, 9 fucks to wherever and back. You had somehow built a really good business early on and completely fucked it up just by being yourself. It's been 26 years, but seriously fuck you. I hope your brother finally got the help he needed and you clearly were not providing.

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