I'm always surprised by the creativity of these personal websites. The web is so utilitarian and marketing oriented that I forget that a web page is a blank canvas ready for artistic expression.
If Neocities captured the Geocities / Angelfire vibes of 1995 - 2001, then Nekoweb captures the budding anime / early Millennial vibe of 2000 - 2006. This was right around the time that Xanga, LiveJournal, and the rest started peeling apart the indie web.
And by the time Facebook started growing, it was game over.
It feels harder every day to not despise the march of technological progress. There are so many eras of computing and internet that I would've loved to see elongated by 10+ years. Then, at least, we would've had more time to get tired of them. Instead, it feels like we're stuck wondering what we lost, in what feels like a very boring and much less fulfilling internet full of SPAM, bots, manipulation, endless pointless culture wars.
Don't get me wrong either, I think computers today are amazing, probably too amazing to be comprehended, but it leaves little to the imagination. You'd think the ubiquitous access to production-quality creativity and development software for free or cheap with commodity computers that are within the reach of many people across the world would be a fantastic outcome that would lead to a Cambrian explosion of creativity. If the era that desktop towers and Flash Player had engendered was great, you'd expect the era after it to be even more wild. Instead though, it's hard to feel that way. Surely the floor and ceiling of production value have raised a bit, but as people in the retro computing and demoscene niches have no doubt taken notice of, limitations breed creativity, and you lose some of that in a world where the capabilities and access have gotten so good. Sure, indie games are in a decent state, but nobody is going to miss the era of Steam Greenlight the way they miss Newgrounds. And if that didn't hurt enough, Internet creativity was at first enriched, then choked out by monetization, as YouTube elevated and then destroyed the prospects of animators on the platform, putting a disgraceful end to the era of Internet animation that proceeded it. Monetization continues to be a rocky road for legitimate creators and a lucrative pay-day for scammers who just steal things and monetize them. The internet, of course, got choked out by corporations and bad actors who realized it was a cheap way to reach a very large amount of people; and now it's not.
I think the surest sign that computers are not exciting anymore is the gradual decline of the software on it. Sure, there's tons of amazing software, but people dread the new updates. How will Firefox tabs get even dumber and uglier? How will Windows become even brazenly more malicious to the user? Which program that I paid for will turn into a subscription product that I can no longer buy new versions of? Software has stagnated, and now a lot of it is pure rent-seeking garbage. What's not is aimlessly redesigning things in an attempt to be "fresh" and "exciting" but people realize that making their browser tabs less legible while taking up more screen space is not fresh or exciting or an improvement of any kind, because end-users are not impressed by your Dribbble, they are trying to use their computer.
No surprise that it's fun to go back and pretend you're on the scrappy Internet that once was, writing dumb web pages in HTML. It feels like something that would've been taken away from us if there was a way for it to be.
This is a major depressive thought of mine; that computers and the internet started as this wild west in which capitalism didn't have a hold, because information that can be infinitely copied cannot have value, but capitalism being extremely adaptive at infecting everything and anything turned it into bland corporate soup, and will continue to do so until every personal terminal is a dumb remote access screen that streams rendered frames from The Cloud and it won't even be a general-purpose computer anymore, much less be capable of running what you want.
Today I'm 25, which puts me at older gen Z, younger millennial, which should have given me the experiences of the time when I was a teenager or kid, but by some cruel twist of fate, I keep discovering things from that time that I wasn't aware of that I still think are incredible as concepts, but make no sense in the modern world beyond being toys.
I think it has less to do with corporations, and more to do with youth culture and us getting old. The internet has more on it than ever, you just need to know where to look. Yes, Newgrounds is dead, but big YouTube animators still exist, and there are still indie game communities like itch.io. But just like my Dad was uninterested in my video games, I find myself uninterested in the stuff kids do these days. I think there is just a nostalgia factor that draws us to stuff like Nekoweb.
Yes, there is a nostalgia factor, but the twist of fate is that it is nostalgia for things I never had. I was never on myspace or geocities or my regional equivalent skyblog. And yet I am nostalgic for it, because the current modern alternatives are profiles on social media.
Modern software development is such dogshit, my 2008 Mac Pro that can encode MP3s at 80x can't even run a damn music player anymore.
The player doesn't do anything new, of course. It was just built in a ridiculous fashion by developers who prioritise their own convenience over everything else.
