Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird? by Jarred Sumner
“MySpace inspired a generation of teenagers to learn how to code. We have Dark Mode now, but where did all the glitter go?”
I may be showing my age here, but I was never on MySpace. That said, this blog post (and the CodeBlog service it’s advertising) reminds me a lot of platforms I do remember, like Tripod and Geocities. Pages were built from raw HTML, and adorned with all sorts of widgets found on places like DynamicDrive and BraveNet. The <blink> tag ran rampant! Early Tumblr had a similar vibe, but look how that turned out.
These early services were places you could experiment and explore until you had the confidence, skills (and cash) to get your own domain name and server. Nowadays anyone can have their own domain and site quickly and cheaply on somewhere like WordPress.com/Blogger, but they are very cookie-cutter and locked down. Even using self-hosted tools like WordPress.org reign-in a lot of the free-form creativity.
One of the reasons I love Kicks Condor is because of how anachronistic and fun it looks; I can easily imagine 15 year-old me, magazine HTML tutorial in hand and full of enthusiasm to learn something fresh and new, creating something similar by accident and having a blast doing it.
By making things easier, more accessible – and safer – it feels like we’ve hidden away the building blocks. It’s harder for people to get at the pieces they need to try their own thing out of curiosity. Can you imagine if LEGO pieces were keyed to only fit a certain way, so you could only build what was shown on the box art?
Shared to IndieWeb.xyz and IndieNews