The modern Internet sucks: Bring back Geocities | Hacker News Reader

The modern Internet sucks: Bring back Geocities

thenextweb.com

28 pointstomkwok5 comments

The thing is... it's still entirely possible to build simple, static web pages. "Geocities" the brand is gone but the concept of the personal website hasn't gone anywhere.

By and large, web consumers have switched from personal homepages to services and social media accounts, and tend to read content from corporate and professional sites as well. But no one is stopping anyone from putting up a weird, half-baked hand-rolled old-school HTML site on some shared server somewhere.

However, don't expect to find a high-paying career with those wicked Notepad skills, because million dollar businesses and multimedia conglomerates (and their customers) have set higher standards for themselves over the last 20-odd years.

The thing is, Geocities mostly sucked as well. And Tripod (even though it gave you Perl.) The content of that 'content-first' web was almost entirely crap. Sturgeon's law is a three-edged sword.

I sympathize with wanting the web to be 'fun again.' If you want to have fun, have fun. But don't wish the rest of the internet never had the choice to expand upon the premise of the web as it was in the 90s.

Although webrings were kind of cool. Those should come back.

The thing that annoys me the most are things that move. If I'm reading something, and something else elsewhere on the page is moving, then that automatically draws my attention. This is very distracting! I understand that advertisers are doing this, but why on earth would anyone put such things on their own site, other than the ads? Here's an example of the sort of mind-boggling stupidity that I'm talking about:

http://wowslider.com/

In the old days, you could just disable animated GIFs and the problem would be solved. Then came Flash, which was also easy enough to disable. But now with Javascript, it's harder. I'm using NoScript, which gets rid of the annoying stuff, but often the websites don't look right.

For me it's when the page itself moves. This can be JS like some annoying ad that pushes the page content down until it is acknowledged and closed OR the worst offender is when on mobile I click something and somewhere in between my physical click and when the click event is actually executed in the browser some additional asset or visual element loads and now I end up clicking on something entirely unintentional.

Why not use neocites?:

https://neocities.org/

Not only do they provide all the good stuff from geocites, but they're a radically open company (not just in the open source sense, but that too):

https://blog.neocities.org/open-company-progress-report-2014...

These articles are getting real old real fast. If you think the modern internet sucks you clearly haven't been developing websites for 10+ years.

> In 2015, becoming a Web developer is all about learning Ruby or figuring out Node.js, not just building cool things you like.

This guy is a moron

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