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I want to emphasize how big the gap is between $3/mo hosting and free. I started programming when I was 12 and I learned I could submit a "website" instead of a very large history project. This was a very long time ago and I'm pretty sure my history teacher did it as a joke because most people didn't even know what a website was.

To get to the point, as a 12 year old coming from a home with absolutely no disposable income, free was the only option I had to try my hand and building a website. I had just built a computer the year before and thought it would be a nifty idea to try my hand in programming. I completed the project and used that skill to earn money during junior high, high school, college and in my career.

I'm not quite sure where I would be today if that teacher didn't put that option on the paper or, and more to the point, GeoCities didn't offer a 100% free way of my hosting my report about the Manhattan Project.

Fully sporting a GIF of a nuclear explosion.

Also, part of the gap is finding a payment method for $3/mo. Kids don't have credit cards of paypal accounts. Lots of parents don't want to sign-up for this mysterious thing called web hosting for their child. I haven't searched for free hosting in 10 years, so I don't know what's currently available, but there's definitely a market out there.

> I don't know what's currently available, but there's definitely a market out there.

Words that have launched a million (now bust) businesses.

When I said I haven't looked for a free host in a decade, and don't know what kind of competition has appeared since then, that wasn't advice to pursue a business. The debate was whether or not a service like neocities has a purpose in current times. I suggested there was still a market, but whether or not a solution exists, I haven't checked.

Is this site still available somewhere (e.g. reocities)?

I heartily agree with this sentiment. Angelfire and GeoCities were gateway sites for that opened the door to a career in web development far beyond animated gifs and marquees.

While I have happily moved on to github and managin my own servers, any platform that promotes writing one's own markup over quick tumblr-esque posting is potentially a good thing.

>I LOVE this idea, and it's totally fine if it becomes "a vast wasteland of garbage" as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Technically, so is YouTube, but you probably don't look at all the garbage. You look at the good stuff that surfaces to the top. Occasionally, you stumble on a gem.

This reminds me of writing blogs and learning to ignore all the inconstructive flames and focus on the people you're affecting positively. Anything worthwhile is bound to create a long tail of haters and garbage. Keeping it up despite these obstacles can be tough but definitely worthwhile.

I don't think we have to worry about "vast wasteland of garbage". Actually, I think that's the wrong moral orientation to take towards this sort of thing entirely.

Apparently one of the early neocities sites is exactly the kind of garbage that used to get made on Geocities: an adolescent fan site for a cartoon. But here's the thing: I made a freaking Pokemon site when I was in second grade or something. It was godawful, but it went up on Tripod and fed my interest in computers. And I sure as hell spent a lot of time at that age reading similar sites to find game cheat-codes.

And nowadays we have commenting and threading engines to let us make sites interactive.

The real internet was always a living embodiment of both Sturgeon's Law and the Long Tail phenomenon. Not every site has to appeal to everyone, but practically everyone can find a site they like.

So this is going to result in a huge amount of brilliant, fun utter crap.

In the interest of encouraging development of modern websites just as good as any non-neocities site, I made a little thing called the 10 MB Manifesto [0]. I also submitted it to HN [1] as I'm looking for discussion.

[0]: http://10mbmanifesto.neocities.org [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5963671

> "a vast wasteland of garbage"

Accurate description of hacker news right there :>

Accurate description of literature, and art, and movies, and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law

So why are you here again?

For the gems, of course! :)

I'm here because it's like an abusive relationship. You think that this time will be different and sometimes you get a sense that you might be right but then you get disappointed every time and realize that things will never be as good as they used to be. Please don't reply with a Wikipedia link to "Whoever's Law" because that would make the abuse worse. The only thing even worse than that would be a link to yourlogicalfallacyis.com.

No, I don't need, I only need one word:

Sonic

I was googling "Whoever's Law" hoping there would finally be a law named "Whoever's Law", because holy shit are there a lot of "Laws" now.

For that 1 in 30 stories.

BTW, I often find the quality of new sumbmissions higher than the homepage.

This is to be expected. New doesn't cater to what holds the interest of the current user base so you get the things most existing users didn't bother upvoting. Basically New is unfiltered through the status quo of "HN appropriateness" even though that's been changing since the time the forum came online.