It’s been more than a decade since GeoCities closed for good and two decades since Yahoo! bought the company despite having no idea on how to make it profitable. Over the past ten years, people have waxed poetic about the importance of what was at one time the third most popular website in the world. That’s great but it ignores one simple fact. GeoCities sucked.
For all the talk about how it was the entry point for countless people and the internet, we forget that GeoCities sucked. In some ways it was the precursor for Twitter. Every useful thing found on GeoCities was surrounded by 10,000 pieces of non-sense.
I mean, did the world really need this quasi-Ron Hextall fan page that barely mentions the Flyers goalie? What about this page from a guy calling himself Phoenix and using flames as a background? And here we have a GeoCities site paying tribute to those “young Southern men who bravely went off to war to defend their homeland” or them Confederate soldiers as most people call them.
And here’s the thing. There were 38 million websites just like these. People with a computer and a 56k dial-up internet connection who got bored one day could post something on the internet. Unfortunately, most people didn’t have anything interesting to post. You can explore some old sites for yourself here.
It’s easy to see why people champion the GeoCities platform. There is probably no MySpace or Facebook without it. But that doesn’t make it good. GeoCities clearly sucked. In many ways, it was like cars in the 1910s. Automobiles, such as Ford’s Model T, were revolutionary at the time and were clearly important in hindsight. But they were also terrible, terrible cars that should be remembered as such.
Greatness in the suck-titude
There is one moment of my life that perfectly exemplifies how GeoCities both sucked and was great. The year was 2001 and I was a junior in high school. There were lots of computers with internet access around, but technology was still super inefficient. Basically, computers at the school had two uses at that time. Either we were using them to burn CDs or play games on Candystand.com.
However, one classmate realized GeoCities could be used as a tool in the never-ending gossip wars found at every suburban high school ever. No one figured out who the culprit was, but this student created a website with some of the most salacious things I’ve ever read to this day.
There was one paragraph on how a girl at the school was using dildos in the bathroom. Another section claimed that a guy on the water polo team banged the coach. That one could have actually been true because the water polo coach was fired a year later for doing “bathing suit inspections” or something along those lines.
However, nothing on this GeoCities gossip website was as scandalous as a claim that a dude watched his sister give a handy to his best friend. Damn, that was cold blooded. I couldn’t find the site in the archive, but it may be in there somewhere.
Looking back on it now, the anything goes element of GeoCities is what made it great. Anyone could post anything and most people would never find out about it. That’s why stuff like this was made (I’m sure Rex Ryan was into that page).
But GeoCities sucked because 98 percent of the pages were just random people creating a site out of sheer boredom and then forgetting about it almost immediately. And let’s not pretend like the content on GeoCities was good back in 1999.
It seems odd to say, but the very thing we love about GeoCities makes it awful. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is no need to claim the same platform that allowed high school students to peddle incest rumors was also a marvel of modern technology.
