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Comment by kalleboo | Hacker News Reader

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 account - there was scarcity and a bit of a hunt.

I ended up going to some other service (it may have been Tripod?) to host my page before we switched ISPs to one that gave you 2 MB of space.

As far as I can tell the "blocks" were never archived so they're missing from the internet archive. You can see the indexes of them here https://web.archive.org/web/19961221013557/http://www.geocit...

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I remember that fondly, that was the time period when I first got online and made my own GeoCities page. I first learned HTML from a page in the Athens neighborhood, on lot 2090. 30 years and I still have that address memorized.

https://web.archive.org/web/19961022173343/http://www.geocit...

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

More archives listed on here:

https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Geocities

It was a nice way to organize things so you could find stuff serendipitously. I remember clicking around in my neighborhood (where I had my N64 cheat codes website) and finding some cool website with lots of slick looking 3D renders. It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

I miss stumbleupon quite a bit. There are similar services but the web itself just doesn't seem to function the same so the websites don't quite hit the same.

Cloudhiker kind of fills the niche but it just isn't the same.

>It's rare to stumble across unplanned-for things like that nowadays.

The phrase "stumble across" made me think of StumbleUpon. And StumbleUpon made me think of HN.

I think we still have serendipity, but there's almost always some implicit popularity or recommendations filter. Hard to sample uniformly at random from the internet. And there doesn't seem to be a ton of demand for that, either.

Probably the best argument for readers sampling uniformly at random is actually on the supply side. It'd be better if content wasn't so optimized for popularity.

>> lots of slick looking 3D renders

one of the first things you had to do when putting up a page on geocities or tripod, or any other host was head over to cooltext.com and design your new logo!

I remember it was controversial and "the beginning of the end" when you no longer had to host at a 4-digit number and could, gasp, use a string for your URL: www.geocities.com/mywebpage instead of www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5372 . The "Acropolis" is because the main top-level "neighborhoods" quickly filled up so you had to pick a sub-neighborhood, making your URL even longer.

Another fun aspect of all this is all their neighborhoods had unpaid "community leaders". The hot neighborhoods got tons of leaders so your in was to pick an "up and coming" neighborhood and apply to be a leader there. All the neighborhoods had themes and rules which the community leaders enforced but they weren't strictly enforced. When GeoCities IPO'd, they threw all their community leaders a few pre-IPO shares and swag, which was super fun and appreciated as a high school student. :)

So basically a precursor to Reddit

I remember desperately wanting a spot on “SunsetStrip” which was where all the music fansites were.

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