snort
Probably should have hosted it in a less obnoxious place to better get the point across. But then again there is already http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ Nitpick: the article talks about the Web, not the internet.As HTML5 has hit its stride, we’ve been lucky enough to receive abominations like parallax scrolling, social media buttons everywhere, loading screens for no apparent reason and scrolljacking.
People who would have used Geocities are using Tumblr now, where they don't have to write their own html. Its signal to noise ratio is infinitesimal and I don't have the patience to plow through it looking for the good parts myself, but I see enough links examples to know they're there. It might be bad for the web that the people posting good weirdness on Tumblr aren't encouraged to become part of building it, but since we're determined to make the web a squeaky clean shopping mall it's probably not bad for them.
But in the days of Geocities, sites often stretched the limits of bandwidth and processor power at the time, and were spiderwebs of PHP glistening with Perl sewage. The same people who think more is better now, thought it then. At least minimalism in design is popular now. Hubski is Arc transitioning to Racket. :DIn 2015, becoming a Web developer is all about learning Ruby or figuring out Node.js
Somewhat related: Today I found myself just hanging around on Richard Stallman's site for a bit because.... I like the (lack of) design, I guess.
This site is all content, provided by multiple people, organized by the crowd, and sorted by the user. There isn't monetization and even if there was it wouldn't be 50 pop-ups like Buzzfeed. The internet is better than it was. This is a lot of Get Off My Lawn '90s Kids Had it So Good' bullshit.
I think, after you get past all the discussion and argument, that all we're really missing is education. People had fun on the internet because it was new and everyone was equally as shitty at playing with it. Every new technology that has ever been invented from cooking to coding has gone through this transformation. Let's imagine a situation where a random event has led to the discovery/invention of "Technology." Now people hear about Technology and either they want to play with it or they tinker with it or whatever. So, now "Person" has gotten a hold of it and assuming that he can afford to work/play/tinker with it, he will learn how to use it better/faster/stronger(?) while everyone else goes about their regular lives. Person is now profiting off normal people and everyone can see the wide-ranging capabilities of people from Person all the way down to Granny. None of this may add to the conversation, but I felt like it was relevant enough and also I'm high.