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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

Now this is the real internet. Real people writing about things they're interested in, and not with the intention of turning it into a content farm. Of course at 7 years old we cannot expect a deep, fleshed out site like in the Geocities golden age, but I wish older kids and adults would continue this practice of authoring their own pages, and manually linking them together. CMSes are incredibly limiting by design, every template forces you into the default of "blog post writing mode" when HTML offers so much more flexibility.

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Agreed. I think it more has become a race to the bottom in terms of content quality/sameness due to it really being a race to make some level of profit. The whole side Hussle culture, and hyper capitalization of all things is quite prevalent throughout society. So of course it influences us to view things with the lens of "is this worth my time if I can't make $x/hr doing it?"

Also, as a nondeveloper i think there is room for a centralized hub for decentralized geocities-esc websites. Especially with the degradation of google search over the years, and the potential for a race to a deeper bottom than before due to AI generated content

Whats wrong with using a CMS? A lot of them offer html content elements if you wish to express yourself more freely

I don't miss the days of framesets and including the header, footer and menu over and over again

A CMS makes the backend inaccessible. Want to add inline styles to a page? You can't. Want to embed a script for some quick interactivity? You can't. Of course you could attempt to locate the theme files and edit them, and edit the configuration files to enqueue scripts but at that point you're no longer having fun.

The only thing you can do is write paragraphs in templated portions of the page. And that's who a CMS is for: people who are doing a job, and have no curiosity about looking under the hood and messing around.

That's not my experience working for CMS like TYPO3 for many years. Although actually using that power without proper training for the editors often results in chaos.