I get more board of the internet each year. Not surprisingly, as I find brain rot and AI content shit. So-called “small web” content is a crappy clone of the 90s internet without knowing its context or that the mid-2000s equalled a million times better.
Nowadays, everyone who’s half-decently creative uses a platform like YouTube, Facebook, or “X”. Platforms with poor discoverability (for finding new content types). Finding creative content means experiencing ever-increasing slop drowning it out.
Eventually, creatives lose that exposure to AI slop and stop creating. No fail-over when all audiences just visit large platforms.
The Mid-2000s
When I got my laptop in 2006, the internet was different. Start of the transition from Web 1.0 (personal websites to Web 2.0 (social media).
In 2006, YouTube = pirated movies and Myspace = Place to share content with friends.
Finding meant visiting creative content, personal websites, and blogs. By 2006, people knew how to create functional websites, but creativity still existed. One memory was of me visiting the home of someone doing stop-motion animation in Norwich. He used Macromedia Flash to turn the photos into a video, then uploaded it (can’t remember URL) with WinSCP.
Then platforms like YouTube took off and took away freedoms in profile design over time, eventually leaving a banner image and thumbnails. No creativity in the design,
The Neocities Problem
Neocities is often mentioned as a solution to social media taking over the internet. Recreating GeoCities, in theory, a good idea. In practice, Neocities is filled with websites created by people too young to have experienced the old internet.
Young people with vague ideas of “retro” design without its context (1990s magazines as no one in the late-90s knew how websites should look), designing knockoffs is uncreative. Even ignoring that mid-2000s web design kept originality but with functionality the 90s never had.
Another horrible 1990s internet problem ported to NeoCities are one-off websites. In the 1990s, many websites were Singler projects (fan sites being common) that, once finished, were never updated. Many NeoCities sites are “personal” ones that should remain updated but rarely are.
Neocities is a fad for Gen Z to pretend to hate social media and think personal websites are “cool” as that’s what came before social media without knowing that having to maintain a website was an effective way to gatekeep the internet from normies.
Normies got board of maintaining their websites, leaving nerds, geeks and creatives as those whose websites got visits by the mid-2000s. A Bluesky or Neocities user are often a political activist wanting to “transing the internet”.
Outsiders already experience the extreme sides of politics every day. To encourage people back to personal websites, there needs to be more real-life content with a less serious attitude.
Post what’s interesting, with your own design. Ignore design trends. Don’t be cringe. Be fun.
Published: 20th March 2026