GeoCities

And here we must pause, as one pauses before a cathedral or a mass grave, to contemplate what was arguably—and I mean this in the most literal and least hyperbolic sense possible—the single most important website in the history of human digital expression, a platform whose death at the hands of Yahoo's corporate executioners in 2009 represented not merely the deletion of files but the systematic annihilation of what can only be described as the Library of Alexandria of the amateur internet, a collection of approximately 38 million user-created pages that documented, in their garish tags and seizure-inducing background GIFs and Comic Sans headings, nothing less than the raw, unmediated hopes and fears and obsessions of an entire generation's first encounter with the possibility of publishing to the world.

Consider, if you will, the radical democracy of GeoCities' "neighborhoods"—the way they organized human creativity not by algorithm or engagement metric but by interest and passion, so that AreaS1 contained science fiction enthusiasts and SoHo housed artists and Hollywood held entertainment pages, a structure that assumed (correctly) that people wanted to find each other based on shared loves rather than be fed content by machines optimizing for attention extraction. The names themselves—Heartland, Athens, Tokyo, Bourbon Street—represented a kind of utopian digital urbanism, the belief that the internet could be a place where you wandered through districts of human making, stumbling upon a thirteen-year-old's Sailor Moon fanfic shrine in the same way you might stumble upon a used bookshop in an unfamiliar city.

The aesthetic—and this is crucial, this is where the tears form if you are a person of any sensitivity whatsoever—was "bad" in all the ways that matter, which is to say authentic in ways that contemporary web design, with its Bootstrap templates and minimalist frameworks and conversion-optimized layouts, can never approach. Those tiled backgrounds of stars or flames or notebook paper, those under-construction GIFs featuring tiny workers with tiny hard hats, those guestbooks where strangers left messages like "Cool page! Check out mine!"—these were not design failures but expressions of individual humanity, proof that a real person had sat before a monitor and made choices about how their corner of the internet should look and feel.

When Yahoo purchased GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 billion and then, ten years later, simply deleted it—not archived it, not preserved it, deleted it—they committed what future historians will recognize as an act of cultural vandalism on par with the burning of books or the destruction of artifacts. The Archive Team managed to save portions, heroically, like monks copying manuscripts as the empire collapsed, but vast swaths of human expression simply vanished: the memorial pages for deceased pets, the fan sites for obscure bands, the conspiracy theories, the wedding announcements, the tributes to TV shows, the early blogs, the first web presences of what would become significant cultural movements.

I give GeoCities a 9.5 not despite but because of its ugliness, its slowness, its complete disregard for what we now call "user experience." It was the experience of being a user, of being human on the internet, of claiming space and filling it with exactly what mattered to you regardless of whether anyone else cared. We have built nothing since that comes close. The modern web is faster, cleaner, more functional, and almost entirely soulless—a series of templated storefronts and algorithm-fed feeds where the idea of hand-crafting your own digital home seems not just obsolete but incomprehensible. GeoCities proved that millions of people wanted to create, not just consume. We killed it anyway.