GeoCities Japan is shutting down | Hacker News Reader

GeoCities Japan is shutting down

qz.com

103 pointsprostoalex26 comments

Slightly off-topic, but I saw in another HN thread the other day that someone created an open source fork of GeoCities. NeoCities [1] and a GitHub repo [2]

I hope it makes a come-back, animated gifs and all.

[1] - https://neocities.org/

[2] - https://github.com/neocities

Depends on your definition of "fork". Successor, maybe.

Neocities has been around for at least 5 years: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724

Very good point. I should have said succeeded.

that site is father of one of the coolest websites ever: https://fauux.neocities.org/

Ive never seen this site but it triggered a memory of browsing the web back in the day where each site was so obviously someones with a unique character evident.

there is also a search engine called http://wiby.me that has a lot of web 1.0 sites, which someone had discussed here before

"A decade ago, internet users who grew up with Web 1.0 bid a fond farewell to [Geocities]" <-- this is what really hit me. It was a decade ago that GeoCities shut down? I honestly would have estimated that to be no more than 5 years ago.

Funny how perspectives work. I had a small Quake page on Geocities, and I know for sure I was in my teens, like 18, so like 20 years ago. So to hear it was ONLY 10 years ago is kinda shocking to me.

I would have guessed 20 years as well

Several years ago, Infoseek, one of the most popular - possibly more than GeoCities - web hosting services in Japan shut down and a huge amount of valuable content accumulated over decades has been lost forever.

What makes matters worse, unlike when GeoCities in the US shut down, no one created an archive of the websites hosted on Infoseek before they went offline. Possibly because they are not interested in preserving cultural legacy.

So I hope someone reading this news would create an archive of GeoCities Japan, as I cannot expect the Japanese to do it.

You should notify ArchiveTeam about it: https://archiveteam.org

How much data is it? Is it really that hard to just keep it available in read-only? Seems like the ads they could serve would justify its existence.

Assuming they have thought of those options, perhaps that tells you how little value there is there.

Yahoo! is known for being overzealous in deleting old content.

https://www.archiveteam.org/index.php?title=Yahoo!

"value"

Today the only measure of "value" is the money it brings. Imagine of museums, archeology, libraries, archivist would only be thinking along those lines as well.

Geocities had a lot of value, and, unlike physical bookshelves, it would have been very simple to keep it going as static, read-only sites. Same applies here.

> Imagine of museums, archeology, libraries, archivist would only be thinking along those lines as well.

You don't have to imagine. They make these kinds of decisions all the time.

I'm not saying that it would have been difficult or expensive to keep it going as a static thing. Just that even a tiny cost is apparently too much.

Maybe this announcement will encourage somebody that cares more about the data than GeoCities Japan to come along and buy it from them with the intention of preserving it.

Seriously. Museums/archives throw out things ALL THE TIME because they can't afford to keep housing them.

It is true that museums and libraries prune their collections. What's not true is that they make these determinations from the same profit motive that drives businesses.

There are probably other costs such as upgrading servers and responding to various legal requests. Legal compliance with respect to changing laws might be a reason why read-only content can not persist forever.

geocities-jpn.tar.gz.torrent ?

https://www.cameronsworld.net/ is a lovely tribute to the lost GeoCities pages (warning has sound).

When I was in Japan Yahoo Search was still the big thing, as alluded to in the article. It seems like their lack of presence on smartphones might have been the beginning of the end for them.

Yahoo Auction Japan (https://auctions.yahoo.co.jp/) is still very active as well.

Maybe eBay saw the writing on the wall there and that's why they bought qoo10.jp.

Fortunately, there is a number of static hosting providers that are better than the old generation nowadays (e.g. GitHub pages, Netlify, Aerobatic). I just hope the content archive is not going to be lost.

> I just hope the content archive is not going to be lost.

https://twitter.com/textfiles/status/1046669423413669888

(and you can (probably) help!)

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