It seems like every neocities page needs an essay justifying the user's choice of site. And who am I to break with tradition?
But really the question is not so much neocities itself, so much as it is Web 1.0 versus the modern web. Don't get me wrong, neocities is very convenient and easy to use and has many great websites (much better than mine ever will be) which I don't mind sharing a site with. But if I had heard of another free hosting service which was as convenient to use, I very well may have picked that instead. The question is why I bother having an old school personal homepage at all, rather than using social media or designing something through the likes of wordpress or squarespace.
I would answer my hypothetical interrogator with another question: is the modern web really more interesting or usable than Web 1.0? Put aside the technological improvements like faster internet speeds (and hence the ability to download and stream content that would have previously been impossible.) Focus just on the design. And in particular when considering a page like mine, think of the modern day equivalent. If some rando wants to make a page just to broadcast his thoughts to no one in particular, how is he going to do it? Probably through a facebook page or a twitter feed. Now compare that to this page, which is just plain text (at least at the time of writing, I'll probably pretty things up with CSS and the like later.) Is the social media page really any better? Sure there are more colors and elements, but these are controlled by the main company and largely have nothing to do with the person that you are interested in. They may as well be blank, and usually only serve as a distraction. Here you can at least focus just on what I am saying rather than what some corporate entity wants you to pay attention to instead.
And of course there is much more potential with what can be done here. At the moment I honestly have no idea how nice I am going to make the site. I may forget about things in a week and just have some random essays for some later internet archaelogist to find. I may redo all the colors, put in a nice navigation frame, add images and interactive elements, etc. Who knows; I'm treating this all like the old days where you make a homepage first and figure out your intentions for it later. But the point is this: I have the capability to do that. If the page looks bland, it is because I was too lazy to make it look better. If it looks amazing, it's because I put in the work to make a masterpiece. But either way the site is an expression of ME and not some corporation.
Modern web design reminds of a townhouse I almost rented (before thankfully finding a better option.) Every townhouse looked pretty, though bland in some hard to define way. The landlord stressed how each townhouse should feel like your home. For example, she explained how each tenant was allowed to paint one wall of his apartment one of four approved colors. (But if you painted two walls, or had a color just a few shades off from the approved list you could get into trouble up to eviction.) Everything was like that: a selection from a paltry lists of options. The end result was that it felt more controlled and impersonal than if no customization was possible at all. And just like how on social media you can run into the censor hammer at any time, there was a feeling that there were unspoken rules about how the "feel" of the community had to be maintained, and if you did anything that the landlord disapproved of you might have action taken against you. I was much more satisfied living in my apartment where the landlord insisted that the walls could not be painted anything but white, but where I could do pretty much whatever else I wanted (so long as it didn't damage anything) with the place.
But that's really just the tip of the explanation. Looks are the most obvious distinction between Web 1.0 sensibilities and the modern web, but there is a host of differences in philosophy. For example, consider how in the old days people wanted to find information on specific topics made by passionate people. Hence the existence of webrings and the like, long before search engines were good. (Of course webrings are once again necessary dude to how crap search engines are today, but that's a different essay.) Now everything is algorithms trying to push you to the same places everyone else goes; there is no sense of adventure or finding anything unique. Everything has the illsuion of content but that's just to drive you into the skinner box where you give clicks to approved content. Whatever this homepage is, at least it isn't taking part in that nonsense.
There will probably be more essays in this vein down the pipeline. I am mainly writing this now because it seems like a neocities rite of passage.
July 2, 2022