Some people just don't have the talent (both artistic/design and programming) to develop a decent looking webpage. The GeoCities era is what spawned The Hamster Dance.
I agree, but at least it was
their vision and work that made it possible. It wasn't just a repository of personal data to be exploited by advertising companies (like Facebook and Google). Besides, there were plenty of great looking and very informative pages to come out of even GeoCities, and those would always lead you to other quality sites via web rings. I think it's harder to find even quality personal websites today. It seems that no one really wants to control their online presence. They're all happy to be exposed via sterile, corporately controlled outlets.
If you searched for something with WebFerret back in the early-to-mid nineties, chances were you'd find hundreds of personal websites with varying opinions and levels of information. Nowadays though? One search engine is more or less the other, and the only results you ever really get are Wikipedia, YouTube, and the established media outlets... all spouting the exact same thing. That's not bad in and of itself, but it's definitely not what I would have liked as an outright replacement. Ideally it would all co-exist together, like it did for a short transitional period of time.
Maybe it's just because I'm a full-time artist. I embraced the internet in its relative infancy because of the great potential it had as a tool for communication and expression. That potential and ability is still there (perhaps even more so as technical limits have decreased), and yet the human element continues to ruin it through a seemingly apathetic attitude toward it all. Most people treat the internet like they would television or the radio, where they are simply consumers. That's not why I fell in love with it as a tool, and it makes me sad to think back to what it once was and how things
could be today.
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