The Day the Neighborhoods Went Dark
When Yahoo! announced in April 2009 that it would be shutting down GeoCities, the service still hosted millions of homepages that had been carefully constructed over the previous decade and a half. The company’s initial notice offered few details beyond a vague promise that it was “focusing on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways.” Within a year, the sites were gone.
For many, the news was an occasion to mourn the end of an era. GeoCities had been where hundreds of thousands of people built their first websites, often as teenagers, often in relative obscurity. But for programmer and archivist Jason Scott, nostalgia wasn’t enough. Scott had recently founded the Archive Team, a group of volunteer internet archivists who used their own computers to download as much of a doomed site as they could before it vanished. As Scott argued at the time, the question of whether GeoCities deserved to exist was beside the point: for an entire generation of web users, it was the place where they first discovered they could publish anything at all, in full color, for anyone with a connection to see.
The Archive Team ultimately saved millions of GeoCities pages before Yahoo! pulled the plug.
GeoCities’ closure struck many as a betrayal of the web’s original promise. Chris Wilson, who worked on Mosaic and later Internet Explorer and Google Chrome, recalled in a talk that the earliest web browsers were built on the assumption that everyone would be both a reader and an author. Tim Berners-Lee’s first browser included tools for creating websites, and Wilson’s own work on Mosaic had experimental features like built-in annotations that let users collaborate on documents. The thinking, Wilson said, was that web server software would be free and that groups of friends would cluster around shared servers. By the time Netscape became a household name, those ambitions had already faded. GeoCities was one of the last places where that participatory vision remained alive.
Building a Home on the Web
David Bohnett came to the web with an interest in bringing people together. A former crisis hotline counselor with a background in ham radio, he saw early on that technology could help him reach others across distances. After a brief stint running a web services agency called Beverly Hills Internet, Bohnett and his business partner John Rezner launched an experiment in 1994: they invited friends to create free homepages, up to 15MB, on a service they called GeoCities.
What made GeoCities instantly distinctive was its guiding metaphor. New users chose a location on a virtual map, and their websites were organized into themed neighborhoods with names like Beverly Hills for fashion, Broadway for the arts, and Heartland for families. The service even limited each neighborhood to 10,000 residents, at which point it would spawn “suburbs.”
The framework encouraged a sense of place that many early web users found reassuring. Historian Ian Milligan, who has studied GeoCities extensively, found that some neighborhoods developed their own voluntary rules and community liaisons who helped newcomers improve their homepages. Milligan argues that these methods, grounded in the rhetoric of place and community, helped make the web accessible to tens of millions of users.
For most, though, GeoCities was simply a place to experiment. It became one of the web’s most visited destinations, known as much for its garish aesthetics—pixelated GIFs, clashing colors, guestbooks—as for its sheer variety. People used their homepages for photo albums, fan sites, and personal musings. As BlackPlanet founder Omar Wasow later put it, the question of whether GeoCities was a community is complicated: “it was community in the sense that it was user-generated content; it was self-expression.”
ChickClick, an early women-focused community, grew out of a similar impulse. Founded by sisters Heather and Heidi Swanson in the early 1990s, the site mixed articles and message boards where women and girls could share stories. It eventually expanded into a network of linked sites, each focused on a narrower demographic. Its most significant innovation came when it offered users their own free homepages; readers became participants in the community they had grown to love.
Neopia and the Worlds People Built
Other early communities created entirely fictional universes. Neopets, launched in 1999 by students Donna Williams and Adam Powell, let users collect and raise virtual pets in the world of Neopia. There was no way to win and no concrete objective. Owners could earn Neopoints through games and spend them on accessories, trade them in a simulated stock market, or use them to buy pets at auction.
Williams and Powell were protective of their creation, enforcing rules to keep the site free of scammers and cheaters. That helped attract a young audience, mostly girls. The users who flocked to Neopia repaid the effort by enriching the world themselves. They traded tips on customization, hunted for Easter eggs, and produced The Neopian Times, a user-run newspaper documenting the fictional goings-on of Neopia that continues to this day.
For many young users, Neopets made coding feel personal and applicable. Profiles could be customized with graphics and colors, and users learned to build their own pages in the process. As the site grew, however, its ambitions grew with it. After being acquired by Doug Dohring and later Viacom, Neopets shifted toward becoming a multimedia franchise. The site overreached and was eventually sold multiple times, but it has remained online, kept alive by its dedicated users.
The Marketplace of Attention
By the mid-1990s, “community” had become a commodity. Search portals like Yahoo! sent visitors elsewhere; online communities had a stickiness that kept them on the page, a quality that attracted advertisers looking to monetize attention. As internet historian Brian McCullough put it, the lesson was that users in an online community were perfectly capable of producing value all by themselves.
iVillage was one of the most prominent attempts to capitalize on that model. Co-founded by Candice Carpenter and Nancy Evans, the company began with a community for parents called Parent Soup, which had started as a channel on AOL. It expanded to sixteen interconnected sites covering careers, dating, health, and other topics. Evans brought editorial experience, and together they resisted the urge to control the conversation. As one writer observed at the time, the emphasis was on what visitors could contribute about parenthood, relationships, and workplace issues, rather than on expert columnists offering advice.
Carpenter’s vision was concise: “to help women in their lives with the stuff big and small that they need to get through.” The site drew millions of users and went through one of the largest IPOs in the tech industry at the time. Its culture was famously chaotic, with a revolving door of CFOs, and its founders were frequent subjects of magazine profiles that emphasized the extravagance of the dot-com boom.
What those profiles often missed, however, was the community itself. Much of the content that made iVillage valuable was generated by users who found one another across vast distances and formed lasting connections. These communities would outlast the boom-and-bust cycle of internet business; they became benchmarks for the social networks that followed.
The Fork in the Road
In February 2002, a Spanish Wikipedia editor named Edgar Enyedy posted a message to the project’s mailing list announcing his departure with a pointed farewell: “Good luck with your wikiPAIDia [sic].” His exit was prompted by a suggestion from Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s first editor-in-chief, that the site might eventually turn to advertising. Sanger had recently been let go as a paid employee due to lack of funds, and he hoped ads might bring him back.
The suggestion touched a nerve. As author Andrew Lih later explained, advertising was “the third-rail topic in the community—touch it only if you’re not afraid to get a massive shock.” By the end of the month, Enyedy had created an independent fork of the Spanish Wikipedia with a list of demands, including a move to a .org domain and a guarantee that the site would never run ads. Most of those demands were eventually met.
The episode revealed something essential about Wikipedia. It had not begun as a community. Its predecessor, Nupedia, was a traditional encyclopedia project founded by Jimmy Wales in 2000 with expert contributors and a rigorous editorial process. After a year, Nupedia had produced fewer than a dozen finished articles. Wales, who had recently learned about wikis, decided to try a different approach. In January 2001, he sent a link to a wiki to a mailing list of about 2,000 Nupedia supporters. The project, renamed Wikipedia, attracted a thousand articles in the first month and ten thousand within six months. Wales changed the content license to allow free distribution and opened the doors to anyone who wanted to contribute.
The community that grew up around Wikipedia was not planned. It evolved through the contributions of outsiders who added new material and insiders who refined and reformatted it. As programmer and activist Aaron Swartz described it, an outsider makes an edit to add a chunk of information, and then insiders make several edits tweaking it. The insiders account for the vast majority of edits, but the outsiders provide nearly all of the content. Media theorist Clay Shirky compared the process to a coral reef, the sum of millions of individual actions, noting that the key was to hand as much freedom as possible to the average user.
Finding a Home in the Shadows
Fanfiction communities found their own space on the web. Fanfiction.net launched in 1998, created by developer Xing Li, who was not himself a fanfiction writer. What made the site different was that its tools—tagging, subscriptions, message boards—were built specifically for fandom. Combined with limited moderation and a fully automated system, that made posting quick and easy.
The site gave a community that had long operated in the shadows a place to gather openly. Members established norms for tagging and discoverability and created a welcoming environment for writers. One early user described the gratification of posting a first story and immediately receiving feedback; another noted that there was a strong sense among writers that they wanted to share their work, to be part of something bigger than themselves.
Li’s devotion to the site was personal and idiosyncratic. He posted a public changelog that mixed site updates with deeply personal anecdotes. The fanfiction community that formed around the site was unique in its attempt to lift members up, with a fluid relationship between readers and writers. The stories users generated acted as a reference for conversation, with one idea flowing into the next.
The Social Web Takes Shape
As the dot-com era wound down, community was repackaged as the social web. Where earlier communities had gathered around niches and shared interests, the new social sites aimed to bring real-life relationships into digital space. Classmates.com, launched in 1995, was one of the earliest examples, designed to reconnect people with former schoolmates.
When Omar Wasow met Benjamin Sun, he brought a philosophy of community building that was deeply considered. Wasow had founded New York Online, a bulletin board system targeting a broad social and ethnic mix rather than the usual pool of tech enthusiasts. When Sun approached him about expanding AsianAve to an African American audience, the site that became BlackPlanet, Wasow applied the same thinking.
Wasow didn’t believe in building a community from scratch. “You don’t build an online community; you join a community,” he later explained. BlackPlanet, he said, allowed its founders to become part of a network that already had centuries of black churches, colleges, and barbecues. The site offered profiles, chat rooms, message boards, and integrated news and email. By the mid-2000s it had millions of users, and Barack Obama joined the site in 2007 while campaigning for president.
Image credit: The New Yorker
BlackPlanet and the communities that preceded it became the template for the social networks that followed. Their creators understood that the technology was only part of the story; what mattered was what people did with it.
