Thirty-eight million personal pages, deleted on a Monday. The largest single act of cultural destruction in the history of the web, and nobody held a funeral.
Cause of death is filed as “Shut down by Yahoo” and having watched it happen I would not change a word. It lasted 15 yrs, which is longer than most and shorter than it deserved.
The record calls this a term. It was closer to a handshake. You said GeoCities and the other person either knew or did not, and that was the entire transaction.
The one thing missing from the headnote: GeoCities landed differently on people who had been online since the 1990s than on anyone who arrived later, and the later arrivals were the ones who spread it.
Filed as evidence: a live mirror of the Heartland neighbourhood, running on a domestic connection in Utrecht since 2011. Still up. Still has the visitor counter, still wrong.
Mine was a page about a cat that had already died. Under construction banner at the bottom for six years. I never did construct it and now nobody can prove I said I would.
Sixteen years today. I still have four pages on a CD-R that no longer reads. The Archive Team saved roughly a terabyte in the six months before the switch, working from a spreadsheet, unpaid, because nobody whose job it was thought any of it was worth the disk.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
