Massive web corporations flush with stock market cash acquired startups for billions of dollars, like rich brats that wanted a cool new toy, but then quickly got tired of it and threw it away. And in the end, we lost a lot of great ideas, companies, and user content that would have otherwise prospered.
Just make it financially infeasible. Spam and psych warfare require an abundance of inexpensive data channels for millions of sockpuppets and AIs. If people really care about quality web content, they'll have to actually value it by paying for it. That, and content will need to be curated; algorithmic feeds were never very good to begin with, and they will only get worse, thus they should be abandoned.
But people think it's an offense to pay $3 a month for X (Musks insufferableness notwithstanding), so slop is what they shall continue to receive.
How does spam make money if it isn't advertising anything, and even if it is who's paying for
"The free interaction is great, but I love the best casino games on onlineslots.fun, amazing ever and I always love win cold hard cash 100% with no credit card sign up trial. Payday loans online."
to be spammed on every old phpBB/SMF forum or article comment section crawled on the web?
I didn't say that content should cost $3 to stop spam. My point was clearly that not enough people aren't even willing to pay that. That price was in reference to what people value. If people value fun web content that's not currently being served to them, they should pay something for it. The vast majority of people simply won't, even if they're spending 1/5 their paycheck on Starbucks. If you think I wouldn't pay for HN if I had no other choice, you'd be mistaken.
But if no one is willing to spend hundreds a year for web content that is not dominated by spam, ads, bots, etc., then spam, ads, and bots is what they will get.
> But if no one is willing to spend hundreds a year for web content that is not dominated by spam, ads, bots, etc., then spam, ads, and bots is what they will get.
Of course no one is willing to do that. For me to spend hundreds a year on any content, that content has to be valuable. If all you can guarantee is that there "won't be bots and spam", that is not enough.
The lesson of Apple, if there is one, is that you can get at least 70% of your potential margins from 10% of people.
The web has become all about pandering. But there are people finding success through cultivating instead of pandering. (I don't know if many Patreon users fit this description, but I'm sure that population is > 0)
That's probably a problem for the hosting company, but it's much less of a problem for users who are navigating via direct links between pages or manually curated webrings rather than using some sort of search feature or recommendation algorithm
Maybe revolutionary things have to be counterculture because if not they don't get a chance to breathe and sort themselves out before the establishment co-opts them.
There is likely some corner of the internet which is experiencing some of the things we complain about, but neither you, me, or any of us here feel/are invited.
I've been wondering very recently if these social cycles (like fashion, the tech pendulum) are less a cynical play by capitalists and collective amnesia by the young, and more a moral equivalent of molting, where we slough off our old skin and get a chance to grow and be shiny for a bit before everything settles back into normal again. Maybe that's why the other two hominids died out and we remained.
Theory: In the not so distance future, “presentation” (design, etc…) will be moved entirely to the user for static sites.
Small, locally run AI will digest and output all content configured perfectly to the users preference. CSS will essentially become a recommendation language for source material at most.
Many benefits will come from this such as solving accessibility permanently or being able to change how you choose to consume content by modifying layout on-demand.
The new goal will not be how to design fun, unique sites — instead simply how fast and easy to get the content up on the net.
This is like hearing about your grandma who, in order to forward a webpage to her nephew, takes a picture on her phone, which opens in the web browser, which she prints to a pdf, which she embeds in a word doc which gets attached to an email.
The idea that "AI" should be at all necessary for turning a markup language back into a markup language is insane. I really hope you're wrong, but realistically that's the direction it will go!
No need for any AI at all. This already exist as Reader View and could be further improved by just normal CSS and HTML parsing. The web has been better by using Reader View as default for many years already, especially on phones.
This was a period where web site discovery services like Stumbleupon were all the rage. It was like spinning the Wheel of Fortune anticipating where you'd land. It was fun! Then poof. It disappeared.
I made Flash games back then and had a personal website I kept them all on. I got a huge burst of traffic thanks to someone adding my site to StumbleUpon (my webhost had analytics and would show me referral links). Ran out of bandwidth several months because of it.
Most of them are only on here[1] now, or in one of the Flash game archives. I should figure some way to get them up and playable elsewhere again. Been debating getting an itch.io page going or something.
What’s missing from the calls for an old web is navigation.
Discoverability requires a crawler, a directory, a hot ranking, or randomization.
What is needed is some kind of hybrid wiki/directory that is more than “page of links to good travel blogs.” It needs to be a database that can be navigated with filters and categories. Filter by travel, filter by country. Filter by food, filter by cuisine, filter by reviews or recipes. It needs both hierarchy and dynamicness, but it also can’t be an open ended search or chat that has no inherent navigation. I want to be able to see what exists before searching, and search should be a tool to refine and pare the results.
The layout and font gives off a more early 2000s vibe than a 90s vibe for sure, or, more accurately, "early 2000s with 90s leftovers." The average Neocities page uses more serif fonts, basic table layouts. Also computers in the 90s weren't going to be able to handle that rain effect, smooth scrolling marquees.
This telling - "yahoo bought geocities and shut it down, thus shutting the open web" - ignores the fact that all the other similar services died a similar fate. All the tripods and angelfires, they started being (1) ignores by general public (2) overrun by spam.
I wonder how does neocities battle spam/bad actors problem.
edit: but maybe I come as too negative. If neocities are working for someone and bring them joy then good
We use a combination of surprisingly powerful and effective things to deal with abuse (spam/phishing/etc). I'd love to show them off because some of them are very cool, but as an older gentleman that used to work at Geocities once told me (he works at the internet archive now), "don't train abuse people, don't let them figure out how you're finding them". Great unsolicited advice that I took to heart. It's always kind of an arms race, but I'm confident we can stay on top of things.
RE Angelfire, it's actually still a company and still hosts most of the sites that have ever been created there: https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/. You can look around for random sites by using "keyword site:angelfire.com" on google search.
"Go to a Facebook profile, and ponder what we have now. Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody’s “profile” looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. Rarely do we create things on these networks; Instead, we consume, and report on our consumption. The uniformity and blandness rival something out of a Soviet bloc residential apartments corridor. And now adding to that analogy, we’ve found out that our government is actually spying on us while we’re doing it, in ways the Stasi could only dream of. The web we have today is a sad, pathetic, consumption-oriented digital iron curtain, and we need to change that."
Exactly what I felt when Youtube removed the ability to customize your channel in 2011, deleted my by then fairly large channel in protest (3000 subs in 2011 was alright sized)
I've enjoyed using Neocities for obscure amateur hobby content, translating 16th-19th C. parlor games that involve creating stories or doing a little light roleplaying: https://wobbupalooza.neocities.org/
One quirk that comes to mind is /whatever.html files automatically redirect to /whatever, so I guess you should treat the name without the .html as canonical
It's been a nice place to host a simple static site. On a personal level, I guess I could probably use GitHub pages just as well? I haven't really thought about it, but Neocities occupies a different niche--small, social, especially friendly to people learning about the web--that I've been happy building on.
Webspaces[1] is my answer to this call for the 3D web emergent metaverse. It's just HTML that you can host anywhere that is rendered as a 3D multiplayer world via p2p webrtc.
Ok, that is one of the weirdest and greatest little web experiences I've had in a while. I walked around shooting other (presumably fellow HNer) characters with my smiley emojis with a big goofy smile on my face. Really neat project!
The web isn't un-fun because of a lack of Geocities or crap websites.
The web today is at least partly a trap, and people are flies to be tranquilised, liquidised and digested from the inside out by governments and corporations. At least that is what they think.
We now know about secret courts, that everything is being recorded to be replayed and reanalysed, continuous tracking, etc. It's a gilded cage, there are doughnuts in there, pron, games - lots of flashing lights.
Anyway, if you're in a cage, even a gilded one, it changes behaviour. Similarly, if you're packed into a densely populated urban area your behaviour changes again.
What 'fun' even means to an animal in a cage, in a framework not of their own making, versus what a wild animal thinks is not comparable, not even on the same plane of existence.
I read a post without noticing it was written in 2013 and thought it was a great idea. It's sad that after 10 years, we have only managed to make the internet worse. With the introduction of LLMs, the situation is expected to worsen. Maybe companies like Kagi will help with this problem, but I don't think the situation will improve anytime soon.
FWIW, I'm actually pretty optimistic about LLMs overall. I really value their use in learning and bouncing ideas off of. A lot of Neocities developers use ChatGPT to help them learn and write HTML (it's great for generating HTML boilerplate), and I use it almost every day for code snippets. I've actually pondered adding an LLM as an assistant for the Neocities editor, but ChatGPT is a bit expensive, and I haven't found a good OSS alternative yet.
The potential for LLMs to generate a lot of problematic crap is certainly there, but I haven't seen this happen yet, don't yet see it as an existential risk to Neocities sites, and if they lead to any new problems, I think we will be able to figure it out.
I believe we will loose all creative people first. Game companies are getting rid of their asset creators as we speak. People use AI trained on content from Deviant art and similar sites. Some artist are looking quite bleak on the future and some have given up already.
As for Neocities I happily jumped on as soon as I saw your first post on HN. Sadly I'm not good at creating, more of a programmer so is mostly using it for holding my small link collection to comics so I can update the current reading location. Love the idea and miss the open web dearly. And already 10 years ago? If I wasn't fully aware how hold I am, I would feel old. But what is 10 years? Blink of an eye.
I mean that LLMs are a problem in the sense that now is extremely easy to create websites hyperoptimized for SEO, which makes discovering personal websites via search engine practically imposible
But there's nothing stopping anyone from making their own website. There are even lots of free options for hosting, the problem is audience, which is captured and driven by platforms.
There must be a way to dispense with platforms entirely...
Hello! I'm still working on Neocities (was in the middle of working on it just now) and I still love working on it. I work on it year round but do most of the huge changes in big pushes (scheduled conveniently between summer and winter, or as the outdoor adventure weirdos like to call it "the shoulder seasons").
I've got a few posts on the TODO list, including a 10 year recap with my thoughts on this blog post and the modern web, and an infra talk (I've promised HN I would show how we did our Anycast CDN with our own IP addresses, sorry for the delay).
I'll try not to go to long here, suffice to say I'm a little surprised with my own writings. I did see some existential problems for the internet in terms of culture, but I also felt like a lot of my premonitions were wishful thinking directed towards making the project successful. So it's even been a real shocker for me to see social media (especially Twitter) take a massive nosedive into the dirt over the last few years (which I'm still sad about, I loved old Twitter), and we've seen a quite substantial increase in new sites and traffic in tandem, which has required a lot of thoughtful (and occasionally rash) upgrades to infrastructure. Things overall are going well and I expect that we'll have another solid year here and won't be running into any sustainability issues.
I wanted to thank the HN community once again for your support all these years. HN was our "angel investor", because we received over $20k in donations after we announced on HN, and that was the funding required to get things booted up and running. Without that initial donation push, I'm not sure the platform would have been as successful as it has been. We remain to this day a self-sustaining platform with no needed investment, thanks to Neocities supporters.
And FWIW, I still find the HN community to be the most thoughtful and interesting conversations on the web right now, even when I don't necessarily agree with everyone (or I say something stupid and get deservedly knocked down for it). Thanks for that, too, y'all are amazing and I hope you have a solid 2024.
So glad to see your parent comment and this one - that was my first thought - sent me on a 5 second check to see if NeoCities was alive and well - obviously is. Love it!
While I'm unlikely to ever create on or browse neocities (I'd kinda forgotten about it), I agree 100% with your concerns about the modern web. And it seems like it got worse since your 2013 blog post.
Thank you for your efforts, I wish you all the best!
I would like to create a site but I have been getting the error "Site creation is currently unavailable, please try again later" for the past week. Can you explain what is happening?
Happy to see it still going. I signed up at Web 1.0 Summit at MIT a few years ago (from my PowerBook G3 running Mac OS 9) and have been paying for it ever since. Keep up the good work.
love what you are doing for the web! unfortunately I've not been able to receive the verification email, I guess you're having some issues at the moment.
Hey Kyle, you're (still) doing awesome! Would be cool if you provided a guestbook service on NC. Too many of your users rely on crappy third party services.
A large amount of the submissions to join my webring ( geekring.net ) comes from neocities users, and it's always a joy to visit their pages, a lot of creativity goes into them!
> Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 billion in bubble stock, and at the time (and perhaps still today) had a toxic approach to acquisitions that would effectively ruin the startups they acquired. Everyone is holding their breath on the Tumblr acquisition to see if they learned their lessons from the previous failures. Hopefully they did.
85 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 137 ms ] threadLooks like this is from the dawn of NeoCities.
Edit: 11 years. Give me a break, it's only Jan 4
This could be a way out: https://qbix.com/blog/2021/01/15/open-source-communities/
Related:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/how-a-web-that-lost-its-way-c...
https://www.laweekly.com/restoring-healthy-communities/
I also interviewed Ian Clarke about Freenet:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ
Here is his latest work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBtyNIqZios
How do you deal with content moderation?
The spammers/native advertisers generating useless content to make a few pennies?
But people think it's an offense to pay $3 a month for X (Musks insufferableness notwithstanding), so slop is what they shall continue to receive.
> But people think it's an offense to pay $3 a month for X
$3 a month, or $8 a month, or $15 a month does not stop spam or advertising or bots as long as the profit is larger than that.
"The free interaction is great, but I love the best casino games on onlineslots.fun, amazing ever and I always love win cold hard cash 100% with no credit card sign up trial. Payday loans online."
to be spammed on every old phpBB/SMF forum or article comment section crawled on the web?
> no credit card sign up trial. Payday loans online
This is advertisement and scams. As long as there are enough suckers clicking through and leaving money at onlineslots.fun, spam will continue.
But if no one is willing to spend hundreds a year for web content that is not dominated by spam, ads, bots, etc., then spam, ads, and bots is what they will get.
Of course no one is willing to do that. For me to spend hundreds a year on any content, that content has to be valuable. If all you can guarantee is that there "won't be bots and spam", that is not enough.
The web has become all about pandering. But there are people finding success through cultivating instead of pandering. (I don't know if many Patreon users fit this description, but I'm sure that population is > 0)
On your own static site all content is written only by you. So there's nothing to moderate.
There is likely some corner of the internet which is experiencing some of the things we complain about, but neither you, me, or any of us here feel/are invited.
I've been wondering very recently if these social cycles (like fashion, the tech pendulum) are less a cynical play by capitalists and collective amnesia by the young, and more a moral equivalent of molting, where we slough off our old skin and get a chance to grow and be shiny for a bit before everything settles back into normal again. Maybe that's why the other two hominids died out and we remained.
Small, locally run AI will digest and output all content configured perfectly to the users preference. CSS will essentially become a recommendation language for source material at most.
Many benefits will come from this such as solving accessibility permanently or being able to change how you choose to consume content by modifying layout on-demand.
The new goal will not be how to design fun, unique sites — instead simply how fast and easy to get the content up on the net.
The idea that "AI" should be at all necessary for turning a markup language back into a markup language is insane. I really hope you're wrong, but realistically that's the direction it will go!
https://wiby.me/surprise/
Most of them are only on here[1] now, or in one of the Flash game archives. I should figure some way to get them up and playable elsewhere again. Been debating getting an itch.io page going or something.
[1]: https://cableshaft.newgrounds.com
Discoverability requires a crawler, a directory, a hot ranking, or randomization.
What is needed is some kind of hybrid wiki/directory that is more than “page of links to good travel blogs.” It needs to be a database that can be navigated with filters and categories. Filter by travel, filter by country. Filter by food, filter by cuisine, filter by reviews or recipes. It needs both hierarchy and dynamicness, but it also can’t be an open ended search or chat that has no inherent navigation. I want to be able to see what exists before searching, and search should be a tool to refine and pare the results.
don't forget webrings!
https://dimden.dev/
something about it is too modern
I wonder how does neocities battle spam/bad actors problem.
edit: but maybe I come as too negative. If neocities are working for someone and bring them joy then good
RE Angelfire, it's actually still a company and still hosts most of the sites that have ever been created there: https://www.angelfire.lycos.com/. You can look around for random sites by using "keyword site:angelfire.com" on google search.
Exactly what I felt when Youtube removed the ability to customize your channel in 2011, deleted my by then fairly large channel in protest (3000 subs in 2011 was alright sized)
One quirk that comes to mind is /whatever.html files automatically redirect to /whatever, so I guess you should treat the name without the .html as canonical
It is open source: https://github.com/neocities
Reasonably featureful: https://neocities.org/supporter
I don't use its developer API, but it has one: https://neocities.org/api
It's been a nice place to host a simple static site. On a personal level, I guess I could probably use GitHub pages just as well? I haven't really thought about it, but Neocities occupies a different niche--small, social, especially friendly to people learning about the web--that I've been happy building on.
For anyone like me who has no need for the $5/mo features but wishes to support the project - I now notice they have a page for donations.
[1] https://webspaces.space
https://simplifier.neocities.org/
https://2bit.neocities.org/
https://town.neocities.org/
It does remind me of StumbleUpon, a browser addon that would take you to a random website whenever you clicked the button.
Which in turn reminds me of https://wiby.me/surprise/, which takes you to a random 90's style website.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=blog.neocities.org
The web today is at least partly a trap, and people are flies to be tranquilised, liquidised and digested from the inside out by governments and corporations. At least that is what they think.
We now know about secret courts, that everything is being recorded to be replayed and reanalysed, continuous tracking, etc. It's a gilded cage, there are doughnuts in there, pron, games - lots of flashing lights.
Anyway, if you're in a cage, even a gilded one, it changes behaviour. Similarly, if you're packed into a densely populated urban area your behaviour changes again.
What 'fun' even means to an animal in a cage, in a framework not of their own making, versus what a wild animal thinks is not comparable, not even on the same plane of existence.
Making the web fun again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5957850 - June 2013 (232 comments)
plus a bit:
Making the Web Fun Again (2013) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27192773 - May 2021 (1 comment)
and more generally:
Neocities: A platform that lets you create your own website/follow other's sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33648618 - Nov 2022 (22 comments)
Neocities showcase – endless source of HTML inspiration - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28953649 - Oct 2021 (1 comment)
Neocities, a 21st century reincarnation of GeoCities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821746 - April 2021 (1 comment)
Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445181 - Jan 2017 (99 comments)
NeoCities can now handle two million web sites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6020776 - July 2013 (98 comments)
NeoCities - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 - June 2013 (209 comments)
The potential for LLMs to generate a lot of problematic crap is certainly there, but I haven't seen this happen yet, don't yet see it as an existential risk to Neocities sites, and if they lead to any new problems, I think we will be able to figure it out.
As for Neocities I happily jumped on as soon as I saw your first post on HN. Sadly I'm not good at creating, more of a programmer so is mostly using it for holding my small link collection to comics so I can update the current reading location. Love the idea and miss the open web dearly. And already 10 years ago? If I wasn't fully aware how hold I am, I would feel old. But what is 10 years? Blink of an eye.
There must be a way to dispense with platforms entirely...
I've got a few posts on the TODO list, including a 10 year recap with my thoughts on this blog post and the modern web, and an infra talk (I've promised HN I would show how we did our Anycast CDN with our own IP addresses, sorry for the delay).
I'll try not to go to long here, suffice to say I'm a little surprised with my own writings. I did see some existential problems for the internet in terms of culture, but I also felt like a lot of my premonitions were wishful thinking directed towards making the project successful. So it's even been a real shocker for me to see social media (especially Twitter) take a massive nosedive into the dirt over the last few years (which I'm still sad about, I loved old Twitter), and we've seen a quite substantial increase in new sites and traffic in tandem, which has required a lot of thoughtful (and occasionally rash) upgrades to infrastructure. Things overall are going well and I expect that we'll have another solid year here and won't be running into any sustainability issues.
I wanted to thank the HN community once again for your support all these years. HN was our "angel investor", because we received over $20k in donations after we announced on HN, and that was the funding required to get things booted up and running. Without that initial donation push, I'm not sure the platform would have been as successful as it has been. We remain to this day a self-sustaining platform with no needed investment, thanks to Neocities supporters.
And FWIW, I still find the HN community to be the most thoughtful and interesting conversations on the web right now, even when I don't necessarily agree with everyone (or I say something stupid and get deservedly knocked down for it). Thanks for that, too, y'all are amazing and I hope you have a solid 2024.
Thank you for your efforts, I wish you all the best!
> Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 billion in bubble stock, and at the time (and perhaps still today) had a toxic approach to acquisitions that would effectively ruin the startups they acquired. Everyone is holding their breath on the Tumblr acquisition to see if they learned their lessons from the previous failures. Hopefully they did.
I come from the future bearing bad news.