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GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
71–80 of 89 posts
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#72My 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 th…
> "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make That idea seems to be coming back.
I have a low traffic site on a VPS that's about 10 USD per month. A kid with motivation and an allowance could do the same.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Tripod was started by some people a few years ahead of me in my college and my social circle heavily overlapped with people who worked there, so lots of us who were still students did part time work there. Later on, I did a summer internship where I actually did software development, not just what we didn't yet call moderation.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#74Funny thing is Tripod, Angelfire, and 50megs are all still around, just no one bothers with them anymore.
I was exploring Angelfire a few years ago to see who still used it and was surprised by the number of Navajo/Dine.
I learned more about bingo and reservation culture, language, and society over that few days than I had in my entire life. Vastly enhanced my understanding of Letterkenny.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#75This 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…
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 mak…
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”.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#76I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoth…
didn't early versions of netscape have a wysiwyg html editor? i think the bigger challenge was highly available hosting. there were authoring tools aplenty.
There were plenty of HTML _editors_, but the process of actually publishing something on the web required technical knowledge about networking and system administration. This was the domain of tech enthusiasts (and still is today), which evolved into the web hosting industry, and later enabled the proliferation of centralized web platforms like social media. My argument is that if tools existed from the very start that made publishing content as easy as web browsers made consuming it, the web would look very different today, and for the better. Clearly this was planned in the early WWW proposals, but never caught on for some reason, and I'm trying to understand why.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#77I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoth…
didn't early versions of netscape have a wysiwyg html editor? i think the bigger challenge was highly available hosting. there were authoring tools aplenty.
No, the earliest I remember what Netscape Communicator, which included the whole suite of Navigator (browser), Composer (wysiwyg editor), Mail, and News (Usenet). That was basically the latest versions of Netscape before its downfall, not the earliest.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Websites" had seemed like these quasi-mythical things that I thought only really rich people or big companies could make That idea seems to be coming back.
I have a low traffic site on a VPS that's about 10 USD per month. A kid with motivation and an allowance could do the same.
Parent said that the idea is coming back, not that the idea is correct.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Today I explained to a sales engineer working at a Fortune 500 company how to open an Incognito window in Google Chrome. Maybe the inflection point was the transition between Windows XP and Windows Vista. In XP, the default behavior was to show file extentions in Windows file explorer. In subsequent Windown releases, file extentions for known file types were hidden by default. This led to future generations being les…
It didn't take deep technical skill and knowledge to build a Geocities website in the 1990s though, and most people who did were minimally computer literate. I feel like you're conflating issues here.
Re: GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
#80I am a firm believer that if the web had working authoring support as originally planned in the proposal document[1] (phase 2), these early web building services wouldn't have been nearly as popular, or would have even been entirely unnecessary. The web would've grown in a distributed way with people having full control over the data they share. Centralized services might not have evolved into the commercial behemoth…
Thank you for the interesting bits of history. I never knew about the planned phase 2, or the other attempts for a more distributed web. I suspect the reasons why it never caught on were much simpler. Most of the early adopters were very enthusiastic, wanted to contribute, and there were many niches where one could contribute something new. Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a…
> Then there is the whole issue of design, which makes publishing on the web a relatively high effort proposition.
Sure, but early web pages were quite rudimentary. A simple tool that allowed adding links and images would have been enough to start with. Later when scripting and styling were standardized, it could've evolved to support those features as well. WYSIWYG HTML editors did this relatively well, but they never solved the more difficult task of actually publishing and serving the content. The best they would do is offer file syncing over FTP, but actually setting up the web server, DNS, etc., was left to the user.
An entire industry of web builders and hosters appeared to fill this void. Services like GeoCities and Tripod were early iterations, and today we have Wix, Squarespace, Wordpress, and countless others. All social media platforms are essentially an offshoot of this, enabling non-technical users to publish content on the web. This proves that it can be done in a user friendly way, but the early web tooling simply didn't exist to empower the user to do this for themselves.
Imagine if instead of using a web browser, consuming web content consisted of a command-line tool to download files from a server, and then opening them up separately in other tools to view them. I love cURL and tools like it, but the reality is that this experiment would have never become mainstream if we didn't have a single tool that offered a cohesive and user friendly experience. This is a large reason why Mosaic was as popular as it was. It really brought the web to the masses.
> Then there are things like hosting. Hosting has always been easy to find, but it is harder to find something stable across time. And discoverability, which has always been an issue but at least centralized services mitigate some of that. And the whole social angle, which instantly makes it more complex to setup and manage.
Sure, but I think those problems would've been solved over time. We see them as difficult today because we always relied on large companies to solve them for us. Instead of search indexers that crawled the web, why couldn't we rely on peer-to-peer protocols instead? DNS was an established protocol at the time that already was highly distributed. The internet itself is distributed. Why couldn't discoverability on the web work in a similar way?
The WWW proposal mentions this point:
> The automatic notification of a reader when new material of interest to him/her has become available. This is essential for news articles, but is very useful for any other material.
This sounds very similar to RSS. So there were early ideas in this direction, but they never solidified. Or if they did, it was too late to gain any traction.
Today the decentralized/federated movement is proof that this _can_ work. Imagine if we had protocols and tools like that from the very beginning. My argument is that the reason we have the highly centralized web of today is because we lacked simple web authoring early on. Non-technical users would have learned to use these tools just as they learned how to use the web browser. Our collective mindset of what the web is and how to participate in it would be built on collaborative instead of consumerist ideals. We would still need some centralized services, of course (e-commerce would still exist), but it wouldn't be for simple things such as publishing content. I even think that the grip of the advertising industry would be far weaker, since they wouldn't be able to profit as much from our personal data. Users would have far more control over their data and privacy. Propaganda and mass psychological manipulation in general wouldn't be as prevalent as they are today.
But maybe all of this is wishful thinking by a jaded mind. :)