Geocities Shutting Down Today

Paolo DF writes "Geocities is closing today. Its advent in 1995 was a sign of the rising 'Internet for everyone' era, when connection speeds were 1,000x or 2,000x slower than is common today. You may love it or hate it, but millions of people had their first contact with a Web presence right here. I know that Geocities is something that most Slashdotters will see as a n00b thing — the Internet was fine before Geocities — but nevertheless I think that some credit is due. Heck, there's even a modified xkcd homepage to mark the occasion." Reader commodore64_love notes a few more tributes around the Web. Last spring we discussed Yahoo's announcment that Geocities would be going away.

Internet Archived; Time to Move On

[eldavojohn]

Most memories of Grandpa have been archived [archive.org]. It's time to pull the plug. RIP you browser crashing old coot.

N00b thing?

[pclminion]

Let's not get all full of ourselves here. We might go way back, but to say that the majority of Slashdotters were online BEFORE Geocities is probably stretching it. I was on the Internet before 1995, and I don't think of Geocities as a "n00b thing." 14 years ago isn't exactly a blink of the eye.

Too bad

[DogDude]

I think it's too bad. Geocities really did make it easy to get a web page online, and is arguably, still one of the easiest ways for *anybody* to get information out there. The beauty of the early web was that there was a lot of weird information that was often maintained by a single person with a passion for, say, peanut butter flavored roller skates. I see the web becoming increasing homogenized today, with lots and lots of interlinking, and less interesting, weird unique content. Despite their annoying JS ads, I'll still miss Geocities.

Re:Internet Archived; Time to Move On

[nametaken]

Meh, it paved the way for the horrors of design and content that replaced it... MySpace and blogs. We've still got those.

Re:N00b thing?

[flitty]

"Winsock"

That word is a swearword to anybody who was new to networking at the time.

R.I.P.

[ari_j]

I am hopeful that any information I may need that was only ever hosted on some guy's Geocities site (probably in SiliconValley) has been archived. There is a lot of it, from information about microcontroller programming to Old English word lists and grammar lessons, that up to last week I ended up at some geocities.com address for. It hosted a lot more than just nested blink and marquee tags.

Re:N00b thing?

[MobyDisk]

I think you misunderstood the n00b comment.

I don't think they meant that people who joined the internet during or after Geocities are n00bs. It meant that Geocities was a way for n00bs to join the internet. Geocities was a point of entry for people who wanted a web page but didn't know HTML, or know what an ISP was, and couldn't pay monthly fees. It was a place where the tag found popularity, full of obnoxious backgrounds, and embedded sound effects. It was a place for n00bs.

Basically, it was like MySpace.

Geospam

[hardihoot]

Failing to turn any significant profit from all of those pop-ups and banner ads (in fact, there's questions about whether GeoCities was ever cash-flow positive), the purchase -- or perhaps Yahoo's inaction once GeoCities was acquired -- turned out to be one of the company's most costly mistakes.

Yahoo is encouraging the relatively few remaining users to transition their accounts to the company's $5-per-month Web hosting service.

All of those pop-ups and banner ads is the reason why I steered clear of Geocities. I made certain to exclude Geocities from all internet searches. If you pop an ad up in my face I will make a personal note never to buy, promote, or recommend the advertised item.

Re:N00b thing?

[dunkelfalke]

Trumpet Winsock wasn't exactly a problem, every computer magazine with a cd had it and Netscape Navigator 1.0 on it. But I had to download the Internet Access Kit and the PPP driver for OS/2 Warp at some BBS.

Aah, what a time. Back then IBM WebExplorer was a decent browser and MSIE was not even in planning.

No C:/ links?

[Picass0]

I dug the broken image links but i would have liked to see one or two hrefs point at a C: drive.

Re:N00b thing?

[afidel]

Some of us predate UID's and only got one to banish John Katz from our homepage.

One of the greatest lessons ever learned...

[Antiocheian]

Geocities made me realize that it is not the medium people lack, but the talent. I would see thousands of people trying to communicate a message and it was really sad to find out that their message would be best if it wasn't communicated at all. Painters with no skill, musicians with no muse, writers who couldn't write an interesting paragraph etc.

I remember I was so optimistic about the freedom of expression and what I experienced in Geocities still remains one of the most bitter experiences about people in general. Perhaps the most. Seeing all those ungifted people patting each other in the back, refusing to accept what they created was trash it was disheartening every day.

I was raised with the philosophy that "whoever thinks freely, thinks well" and it was in Geocities that I discovered how false that is. I am thankful for that, but did it have to be so blunt?

The fanfic pages

[Dartz-IRL]

Slashdot may laugh at fanfic readers, but a lot of old classics are going poof as we speak. The things we first read when we found the web and were curious and naive are gone now. And in many cases, gone forever. A lot of amateur author's pages are going down, and a lot of good stories are going with them.

More's the pity really.

Re:N00b thing?

[sjames]

N00b is relative. In those days, to become a n00b, you had to first know the internet existed (many were blissfully unaware), then figure out Linux or Trumpet winsock. Being a bit geeky was a prerequisite for n00bdom on the net. Then AOL came along and lowered the bar for becoming a n00b (and thus the quality of n00bs).