💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2022 › 202205 › 20220522-the-human-web.gmi captured on 2022-06-11 at 20:43:32. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
---
I saw a very interesting post by Dima^ about the aesthetics of personal sites on Neocities.
Neocities is a website hosting service in the style of the now-defunct Geocities: users can host static HTML pages, optionally styled with CSS or featuring Javascript, but the service does not allow any server-side scripting. Neocities has gained quite a bit of traction among fans of retro sites and services, and they now host over four hundred thousand sites. Dima noted that many Neocities users seem to share some common sentiments: a desire to have complete control of one's online presence, a desire to express themselves without limitations, and a distrust of large, highly-centralized, profit-driven Web services.
Another commonality is the preference of site aesthetic among the users: almost all Neocities sites conform to "Web 1.0" designs, such as bright colors, wide blocks of text, 3D-style buttons, GIFs, and even mock Windows 9x or Windows XP OS components such as taskbars. Even users who are currently teenagers--who weren't alive when these site design were widespread on the Internet--seem to adopt them almost universally on Neocities. Dima wondered: why?
I am a child of the 1990s, and some of my early experiences of the Web were through Geocities, on which I had a few sites of my own. As such, I can't speak specifically for those who were first exposed to the Internet in its modern form. But I know I have a fascination with BBSes, teletext, amateur radio, and other forms of technology that were on the wane when I was born, and I suspect some of my fascination comes from similar sentiments.
The Internet has become a big, big place. By its very nature, it attempts to connect all people around the world, from all cultures, from all walks of life, and ostensibly tries to give them equal space inside the global public square. That's a huge space to try to outright control, but it's also an easy space to manipulate given the right social tactics. Social media sites, from Facebook to Instagram to Truth Social, blatantly use this manipulation to trap users in their services, extract data and ad revenue from them, and control narratives in one direction or another.
As part of that rush for profit, big websites are very carefully designed and curated to draw as much attention for as long as possible. Their designs are sterile (flat colors and smooth edges), highly contrived (built to subtly direct the movement of one's eyes), soft (rounded corners and simple fonts), and in general quite beguiling. Huge UX teams spend thousands of hours and millions of dollars fine-tuning the most minute details of a page, from the kerning of fonts to the duration of menu animations.
The result of all this is a site that feels extremely impersonal and disingenuous. No single human can create an experience that seamless and tightly themed. No independent site owner would have the time to calibrate that many aspects of page design, and anyone who tried would have a site completely bereft of interesting or engaging content. Users can tell they're being catered to, and that the site isn't trying to express something of its own.
I like to think of this as the loss of the "human scale". Companies are not humans; they don't behave like humans and they don't interact with humans the way other humans do. And most people would much rather interact with other humans than with companies.
When individual people build Web pages, it's almost always because they have something they want to share with the world. The focus of each page is thus the actual content of the page, not necessarily the presentation of that content. Some of the most interesting sites on the Internet are simple blocks of text on a simple background, because the actual writing is what captivates the reader. There may be some scripts or images, or some stylesheets to unify color schemes, but otherwise the strength of the content is what will or won't attract visitors to the site.
Social media sites in particular cannot do this. They are entirely reliant on users submitting content that other users will find interesting, and in the absence of such compelling content, the design is all that's left to draw eyeballs back to the page. Whether access is performed through a Web browser or an app makes no difference.
Thoughtful and meaningful content will grow a Web site's popularity and maintain traffic to it, regardless of design choices. The Internet used to be far more heavily populated with such sites in the 1990s and early 2000s--a time when style choices and philosophies for the Web were limited. The few choices people had to customize their sites meant they had to compensate with interesting content--there were no flashy scrolling ads or phone-centric menu layouts to hide behind.
I think this state of affairs resulted in people associating simple site aesthetics with interesting site content.
Today, people have almost unlimited choices of how they want to build a Web site and how they want to make it look. But keeping things simple not only reduces overhead and saves on design time, but it puts one's content and information in the fore. If you have something worthwhile to say, people will read it, even if it's written in black Times New Roman on a blank white background.
A lack of flashy design elements also brings with it a sense of authenticity. People know that companies are simply trying to get their users' attention because time spent on the platform means more revenue for the company. Communities like Neocities, and even Gemini, rely heavily on candid and well-meaning conversation, rather than hollow manipulation or flattery, and simple designs help to convey to visitors that the site owner like them to focus on the writing rather than the color scheme.
This is analogous to how people speak to each other in real life. When we meet someone on the street or at a party, we unconsciously pay attention to how they talk. If they couch meaningless sentiments in flowery language, or if they use exaggerated inflections in their voice, we tend not to trust what they say, even if they're saying something we agree with. Focusing too much on presentation cheapens the value of what is being said, whether in audible space or in cyberspace.
There's been a lot of discussion on Geminispace recently about sincere conversations online^^. These seem to be in shorter and shorter supply in the modern day. Neocities, Gemini, Gopher, and communities like them are trying to reclaim some of that lost discourse, and a since simple page designs force the discussion to stand on their own, I think it's an integral part of fostering a open, frank space.
Dima pondered near the end of the post about what can be done to prevent small spaces like Geminispace from becoming large and corporatized.
I should mention that I don't believe Gemini, Neocities, or any other "small Web" community to be inherently anti-capitalist. If people want to use older, smaller, or simpler technology to engage in voluntary exchanges of goods and services, monetarily or otherwise, I don't see anything about them that necessarily hinders the ability to perform those exchanges. Craigslist has been engaging in business using a simple Web interface for decades. One could argue that the small Web is anti-corporatist (designed to avoid becoming subservient to a pure profit motive) or anti-consumerist (designed to avoid endlessly targeting our dopamine receptors), but those things are not the same as being anti-capitalist.
But even if capitalist endeavors and the small Web can coexist, how can these other forces be kept out? That's what so many users are trying to run away from on the mainline Internet in the first place.
What will matter most in maintaining the integrity of these communities, in my opinion, is maintaining people's ability to self-organize.
Note that the ability to self-organize is not the same as increasing inclusivity, not is it the same as lowering barriers to entry. What I think matters is that once people have whatever access they need, be it hosting a Web page or a Gemini capsule, they can do with that resource as they choose.
Social media began with giving such a promise to its users. Facebook and Twitter originally had timelines that only showed posts from friends and pages you actively followed, in chronological order, with no sponsored content. People could self-organize and form any kind of community they wanted, and because of that freedom, the quality of content was high. As the big tech companies began implementing algorithms, advertisements, and shadow-ban mechanisms, people's ability to engage with what they wanted was stifled. The quality of discourse quickly eroded, so much so that today people are leaving Facebook and Twitter in droves. Gemini can avoid this trap by maintaining as much freedom and agency for visitors and operators as possible.
Adherence to the core protocol is very important--the biggest danger lies in "extending" the protocol in a way to undermine it, such as is outlined in Skylar Hill's hypothetical invasion of Gemini^^^. As long as people can host content of their own and freely find other people's content in Geminispace, they will seek out content that interests them, and they will be able to filter out the crud. After all, extending the protocol into something flashy and eye-grabbing will add just a strong a veneer of insincerity as it did on the Web.
To sum up, I think there is a strong correlation between the simplicity of an idea's presentation and the perception that the idea is worth considering. It's akin to the libertarian adage that "good ideas don't require force": if a discussion is engaging, entertaining, or otherwise worth reading, the fact that it's worth reading with get the visitor to read it. Trying too hard to "dress up" content gives the impression that the site is trying to dazzle the reader with colors and shapes, and by extension, maybe the core content isn't that interesting or sincere.
Simple site designs give content nowhere to hide. It must stand on its own, or it will not garner any interest. And as a result, community members are encouraged to be thoughtful and considerate in their discourse. It's true whether the discussion is happening on Gemini, over Usenet, on the crosstown bus, or anywhere else.
^ Neocities: the 90's Aesthetic as a Symbol?
^^ Cosmos thread 6053 (The Disappearance of Sincere Conversations)
^^^ A Hypothetical Capitalist Invasion of Geminispace
---
[Last updated: 2022-05-22]