The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the Old Internet

Gizmodo is 20 years outdated! To have fun the anniversary, we’re wanting again at among the most important methods our lives have been thrown for a loop by our digital instruments.

In the early aughts, my wheezing dialup connection usually operated as if it had been perpetually out of breath. Thus, not like my childhood mates, it was close to to inconceivable for me to look at movies, TV reveals, or hearken to music. Far from feeling restricted, I felt like I used to be fortunate, for I had entry to an encyclopedia of lovingly curated pages about something I wished to know—which in these days was anime—the vast majority of which was conveniently situated on GeoCities.

For all of the zoomers scrunching up their brows, right here’s a primer. Back within the Nineties, earlier than the beginning of recent webhosting family names like GoDaddy and WP Engine, it wasn’t precisely easy or cheap to publish a private web site. This all modified when GeoCities got here on the scene in 1994.

The firm gave anyone their own little space of the online in the event that they wished it, offering customers with roughly 2 MB of house without spending a dime to create a web site on any matter they wished. Millions took GeoCities up on its provide, creating their very own selfmade web sites with net counters, flashing textual content, floating banners, auto-playing sound recordsdata, and Comic Sans.

Unlike in the present day’s Wild Wild Internet, web sites on GeoCities had been organized into digital neighborhoods, or communities, constructed round themes. “HotSprings” was devoted to well being and health, whereas “Area 51” was for sci-fi and fantasy nerds. There was a bottom-up concentrate on customers and the content material they created, a mirror of what the general public web was like in its infancy. Overall, at the very least 38 million webpages had been constructed on GeoCities. At one level, it was the third most-visited area on-line.

Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.6 billion. The company lived on for a decade more until Yahoo shut it down in 2009, deleting millions of sites.

Nearly two decades have passed since GeoCities, founded by David Bohnett, made its debut, and there is no doubt that the internet is a very different place than it was then. No longer filled with webpages on random subjects made by passionate folks, it now feels like we live in a cyberspace dominated by skyscrapers—named Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, and so on—instead of neighborhoods.

Proponents of Web3, like Andreessen Horowitz general partner Chris Dixon, argue that we need to get back to what we had in the days of GeoCities—while also not giving up the advances of the Web2 years—and allow creators and businesses to form a relationship with their audiences that is not governed by algorithms and advertising. It’s yet to be seen if the version of Web3 backed by Dixon will ever materialize but it’s not looking good.

We can, however, ask GeoCities’ founder what he thinks of the internet of today, subsumed by social media networks, hate speech, and more corporate than ever. Bohnett now focuses on funding entrepreneurs through Baroda Ventures, an early-stage tech fund he founded, and on philanthropy with the David Bohnett Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to social justice and social activism that he chairs.

Right off the bat, Bohnett says something that strikes me. It may, in fact, be the sentence that summarizes the key distinction between the internet of the ‘90s-early 2000s and the internet we have today.

“GeoCities was not about self-promotion,” Bohnett told Gizmodo in an interview. “It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.”

This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

Gizmodo: When I think about the hallmarks of the internet over the last 20 years, one of the first things that comes to mind is GeoCities. Frankly, the sites were some of the only things I could load up with my dialup connection and I loved them. Obviously, the internet has changed a lot since then and we really wanted to talk to you and get your thoughts on the internet of today.

DB: I think you’ve written half the article already in terms of what GeoCities was like. If you think back to that point, you were probably excited because the internet was very new and you had a place where you could create your own web page. We gave you the tools to create your own web page, and you could browse other web pages and meet people of similar interests. And it was exciting.

It really was a forerunner of the social networks to come, as you learn. One of the things that has surprised me is how far away we’ve gotten from [that time]. The heart of GeoCities was sharing your knowledge and passions about subjects with other people. It really wasn’t about what you had to eat and where you’ve traveled. There was a travel section, but it was really more about tapping into your personal passion and giving you a format to join a like-minded community and share that with other people. It wasn’t anything about your face.

Facebook is called Facebook for a reason, because it was all about people’s faces. So, what has surprised me is how far away we’ve gotten from that original intent and how difficult it is [now]. It’s so fractured these days for people to find individual communities. There’s various sites, of course, like Reddit and others. And so, you know, maybe it’s because it was early, maybe it’s because of the time. But I’ve been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we’ve seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And GeoCities was not about self-promotion. It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge. That’s something that frankly surprised me.

Gizmodo: Can you tell me a bit about what you’re doing now?

DB: Just about the time after GeoCities went public and about the time we sold to Yahoo [1999], I was getting approached by other entrepreneurs starting their own internet companies way back in the day, like Stamps.com and WireImage and NetZero and Gamesville. And so, I started my own early-stage tech fund way back at the end of the GeoCities days, and I’ve done that for the last 20 plus years, [which] is invest in early-stage tech startups, and it’s still something that I do today. I’ve really enjoyed a long professional career helping entrepreneurs build their business primarily on the internet. Separate from that but somewhat related is that at the time GeoCities was sold, I set up my own nonprofit foundation, the David Bohnett Foundation, focused on social justice and social activism. For the last 20 plus years, I’ve also been focused on philanthropy and nonprofit work in the social justice and social service arena.

Gizmodo: What made you decide to focus on social justice and social service?

DB: Well, part of it is also the spirit of GeoCities, which is empowering people. It’s just in my nature, whether it’s through my venture capital work, investing in young entrepreneurs, whether it was GeoCities, empowering people to meet others and share their interests, or whether it’s in philanthropy to empower organizations to help people achieve their full potential and deal with critical social issues like gun violence and civil rights, etc. It’s a theme that is consistent in my personal and professional life about empowering people and empowering communities.

Gizmodo: It’s been almost two decades since you founded GeoCities and the internet has changed a lot since then. And you answered this a bit earlier, but I wanted to ask if you had any more impressions on how the internet of today has changed since the nineties when GeoCities was all the rage.

DB: I think it’s important to remind ourselves that the pace of innovation on the internet continues to accelerate, meaning we’re not near done. In the early days when you had dial up and it was the desktop, how could you possibly envision an Uber? You know, [the idea that] you’d have this mobile phone in your hand, and it’s connected wirelessly to the internet all the time, and you can order a car and it shows up. Look at all the things that had to happen between the time you were on GeoCities and [the time of] Uber, all the technological advance, etc. We’re still in that trajectory where there’s going to be various technologies and ways of communicating with each other, [as well as] wearable devices, blockchain technology, virtual reality, that will be as astounding as Uber seemed in the early days of GeoCities. I’m very, very excited about the future, which is why I continue to invest in early-stage startups because as I say, the pace of innovation accelerates and builds on top of itself. It’s so exciting to see where we might go.

Gizmodo: Historically, GeoCities has been described as a Facebook and MySpace prototype. Have you ever thought that? Do you still agree?

DB: Well, what I’ve always thought about was a continuum of whether people want to call it online communities or a continuum of social networks. There were online communities before GeoCities, notably places called The Well. There had been proprietary bulletin board techniques. There was AOL, there was CompuServe, there was Prodigy. You can plot a continuum of both on-line communities and or social networks. And there’s only a development of them going ahead. We occupied a giant chunk within the early days of the web after which Friendster got here alongside and MySpace and Facebook. There are, after all, different social networks now in addition to Facebook. And there’ll proceed to be a continued fragmentation going ahead for all this.

Gizmodo: Do you see something on the web in the present day that resembles GeoCities?

DB: There are items of it. There are items the place you’ll find area of interest communities about virtually something, however I don’t see something that basically is solely centered on aggregating communities of curiosity. Certainly, Facebook has all types of particular curiosity teams and boards and pages, however there’s all the opposite stuff, too. I don’t see anyone place that may be a group of particular pursuits.

Gizmodo: And do you suppose the web wants that? Do you suppose that we’re all worse off as a result of we don’t have a model of GeoCities these days?

DB: What we actually want is an consciousness, and this simply sounds simplistic, however we’d like an consciousness of the significance of sharing offline. I’m additionally kind of discouraged by how a lot time all of us spend on-line versus historically spend with our households and our communities. I’m unsure I want there was a spot like that on the web now versus I want there have been an increasing number of methods for folks to work together in particular person.

Gizmodo: There at the moment are much more social media networks in addition to Facebook. Are you energetic on any of the social media networks? What do you consider them?

DB: That’s an excellent query. I’ve been energetic on virtually all of them. I’m not an energetic contributor. I’ll simply say I’m an energetic participant. I’ll watch TikTookay movies. I’ll take a look at Instagram. I’m not a contributor, however I’m a participant.

Gizmodo: What do you consider Instagram and TikTookay? 

DB: I feel that notably TikTookay, [there’s an] astounding quantity of creativity that TikTookay has unleashed that you just actually don’t see on Instagram. It’s encouraging to see that there’s a discussion board for folks to do actually, actually humorous, intelligent, attention-grabbing issues. I feel that’s truly very constructive.

Gizmodo: Some of the most important challenges that social media networks face these days are associated to content material moderation, curbing hate, and stopping misinformation. What do you consider these challenges and did you face something comparable within the days of GeoCities?

DB: We confronted precisely the identical challenges corporations are dealing with in the present day, and the one means we might take care of these was to proceed to boost our content material tips and be very, very deliberate—very, very strict. We simply banned all types of speech that’s allowed in the present day. We wouldn’t permit it on the platform. And the best way we did that was inside every group we’d give precise customers the instruments to browse their neighborhoods and browse their explicit material and kick folks off [when they] had been inconsistent with the content material tips. I feel it was simpler for us as a result of we had been organized based mostly on particular material. We didn’t have an open discussion board for hate speech, for instance. If you had been creating a rustic music web page in one among our communities, if it wasn’t about nation music, you bought kicked out. We had been a really curated group that leveraged the ability of the group to observe and keep the integrity of the topics.

Now, the a lot bigger query about one thing like Twitter or Facebook—I don’t know. I imply, that’s an issue that nobody has actually been capable of resolve and I feel many of those platforms have abdicated their duty for coping with hate speech. It might be a task for presidency when it comes to [creating] content material tips. I imply, you may’t go on broadcast tv to say the issues that individuals say on-line. You simply can’t, there are requirements. There are broadcast requirements that forestall stations from airing that sort of content material. There’s actually a mannequin for having requirements and content material. People overlook that. They suppose, “Oh, you know, it can never be done.” You can’t tune into any broadcast channel and see anyplace close to the hate speech we’re seeing on-line. So why can’t that be regulated the identical means it’s on broadcast?

Gizmodo: Yeah, I don’t keep in mind hate speech being that a lot of an issue on GeoCities.

DB: We had no group for it. The communities had been about explicit topics and material. So that was kind of saved constant and clear.

Gizmodo: And did you all have content material moderators?

DB: We did. As I say, we deputized customers to be content material moderators and we gave them the instruments to average the content material.

Gizmodo: But so far as company-hired moderators, did you all have that?

DB: No. We had company-hired people who set the rules, then we’d depend on our customers to average the content material. There had been customer support folks and in the event that they noticed extraordinarily egregious content material, they’d simply take it down, however that wasn’t their main duty.

Gizmodo: I’ve heard some folks say that GeoCities was an instance of how you might have web sites that had been tremendous well-liked and simply didn’t make any cash. And that was okay. What are your ideas on this?

DB: Well, we did generate profits as a result of we had advertisers that had promoting banners throughout quite a lot of the person pages as a result of they had been very particular. Just like I talked about earlier, the regulatory atmosphere, and I’m not in favor of restrictive regulation, however the regulatory atmosphere has not saved up with the expansion of the Internet. That’s the straightforward reply for that.

Gizmodo: Do you see the identical sort of creativity within the web in the present day that you just noticed again within the GeoCities days?

DB: [As] with TikTookay, it’s very, very fragmented. It’s there, persons are creating very progressive and inventive content material. But once more, it’s turn into rather more top-down. It’s turn into rather more about streaming with the streaming platforms than it ever was. The streaming platforms have come to dominate in a means that I hoped wasn’t going to occur, but it surely has. But there’s nonetheless an terrible lot of very progressive stuff being created.

Gizmodo: And in addition to TikTookay, do you could have another examples?

DB: Some of the Reddit stuff is absolutely attention-grabbing that I’ve seen. I simply take a look at completely different boards and folks contributing their data in several methods based mostly on their material. Reddit could be the opposite one I might discuss.

Gizmodo: What would you say is the most important problem dealing with the Internet in the present day?

DB: The proven fact that there’s not one Internet anymore, the truth that there’s censorship in several elements of the [world] that block off the Internet. We’re actually not one Internet. There’s China, there’s the Middle East, there’s Russia. And it’s turn into very what I name “balkanized.” I feel that’s the most important problem.

Gizmodo: What is your greatest hope for the Internet going ahead?

DB: I suppose my greatest hope is that it reaches all of the people who it hasn’t reached but. I’m nonetheless very optimistic in regards to the energy of data change and my greatest hope is that broadband continues to be deployed worldwide. Because with all of the challenges we’ve talked about, there’s nonetheless a terrific benefit and a terrific upside for those that are related and the people who aren’t related are falling farther and farther behind. So that’s my hope, that an increasing number of folks get related so that they don’t fall farther and farther behind.