Geocities has closed down. Frankly, this came as a bit of a surprise to me, as I didn’t know it was still around.
The whole service represented everything that was wrong with not only web authoring, but the whole idea that anyone could (or should) do it. It gave people a venue to publish whatever they wanted, no matter how inane, vapid, or just irrelevant. The result was that people who could barely write a sentence in their native language were now all “webmasters.”
Webmasters! Talk about empowerment.
I guess the word looked pretty impressive on a resume in 1997 or so. The internet was a big thing back then. People who couldn’t grasp the intricacies of the “Num Lock” key needed a place to show off things they’d found on other web sites, and without Geocities, how else would the world have been exposed to the wonders of guestbooks, site counters, web rings and the always-popular 404 error?
Oh, and let’s not forget the wonders of the blink tag, which is still supported in CSS to this day. Why? Heck if I know.
Of course, there’s a difference between running the website of a major company and being the “webmaster” of http://geocities.com/marginaltown/11386/aa41/~ub3rd00d. The former is a career choice, the latter is a matter of inflicting your mediocrity on the world.
The endeavor of polluting the internet with this garish, bandwidth-gouging dionysian orgy of suck has largely been inherited by MySpace, which is even worse, given the sheer throughput it takes to deliver megabytes of video, images and audio before the text even loads.
In the late 1990’s, we were still largely on dial-up. That meant modems, which meant download speeds of ~38kb/s on average. If your “Chebacca ate my balls” site ran for 16 pages on the index and had 14 different animated gifs, that meant it was not only eating your testicles, but my time as well. The order of the day for web authoring was supposed to be economy and clarity. It was not supposed to be a collection of various memes you’ve simply collected and reposted from other web sites.
At the time, I figured that the bandwidth bottleneck would make things so frustrating that many of these people would simply stop using the internet. Perhaps they would take up more rewarding hobbies, like philately or masturbation, but that was not to be.
Instead, we had an odd perversion of Moore’s Law, and bandwidth expanded to fill demand, which led to even more of it being wasted in return. Take IGN.com, for example. Go ahead. With a cable internet connection, it takes almost fifteen seconds to download the page. You have to wait for at least 26 images, several scripts and two flash animations to load before the text is even visible. Some of those images are images of text. Oh, and the text itself? Black lettering on a dark red background.
Now imagine waiting for this stuff to download on a modem. There are still places in this world that don’t have broadband, you know.
Of course, the delay isn’t entirely bandwidth. The information is downloading quickly, but part of the bottleneck is local. I can hear my hard drive thrashing away like crazy as the page loads. The reason is that all that stuff has to be cached and rendered by the browser. So now you’re screwing with my bandwidth and my CPU load. Thanks a whole lot, there.
Seriously, IGN is dumping so much refuse on my computer that it’s struggling to interpret it all. And for what? I’m not downloading the Grapes of Wrath, for Pete’s sake. There’s less than two pages worth of actual information in all of that dreck.
All it needs is that godforsaken dancing baby animation, and perhaps a MIDI file of “Chocolate Rain.” Then we’d have come full circle.
We can thank Geocities, for helping to blaze that trail. It wasn’t alone, but it stands as a reminder of when it all started to go wrong.