[gonzobonzo]

Those people would have been more tuned in, since it was the early days of the Web. But in terms of technical skills? Throwing up a very simple Geocities page was about as much effort as starting a blog on Blogger. Easier than fiddling around with Wordpress most of the time.

It was likely a lot easier for most people than having to figure out how to do something in DOS (which was also pretty common at the time).

[p3rls]

Throwing up a page on geocities and editing the HTML was not only easy but it was fun, and you could immediately get into a dopamine-feedback loop that sees you actually improving your basic web development skills. The game-designers paradigm of "easy to learn, hard to master" rings out here.

Back then even throwing up a colored background and marquee text was sorta thrilling. I remember people put so much effort even to basic shit like their AOL profiles back in 1999 and that sorta bled into the personal website scene. But really for me I think it was tools like html and geocities that enabled this.

But where is that today? Python beginner webdev stuff? Can you really get into that feedback loop by messing around with flask and elixir? I guess it must work for some people but I look out at the web today and most of what I see is SEO garbage. Definitely not 100 flowers blooming, but one ugly google-kudzu blanketing the entire thing.