I think MySpace ultimately represented the final form of the essentially unlimited customization of the early web. The terribleness of MySpace pages was, I believe, the catalyst that pushed the design trend in the opposite direction, resulting in the "standardized array of fields" as popularized by Facebook.

That said, given the cyclical nature of design trends, I strongly suspect that we'll eventually start to see a gradual shift back toward customization, hopefully avoiding the ridiculous excesses of the MySpace era.

Tumblr themes still work like this. Tumblr is actually an almost-perfect natural experiment on the value of customization, because there are two views of any given blog post: a public-indexed static HTML view, that the post's author can theme with whatever HTML+CSS+JS they desire; and an RSS-reader-like "dashboard" view, with no theming at all.

Polling Tumblr users on how they prefer to read pages—whether in the dashboard web-app, or by opening the links to the standalone HTML versions—would be pretty solid data on whether customization makes content overall better or worse from consumers' perspective.

I think a lot more sites should follow Tumblr's lead here, but I fear Tumblr is going to be shut down within the next few years and it'll be the last platform to adopt this approach (at least for a long time).

Why do you think tumblr is on the way out?

Possibly because it's owned by Yahoo and Yahoo seems to be going down the toilet? At least that's how I interpreted the parent.

I know I dont open tumblr links on mobile since they take so long to load.

Tumblr has never really lost its wide variety of customization. I'd argue it carried on the Geocities and MySpace individual touch. If you go from one personal tumblr to the next, they often vary to a great degree in atmosphere, color scheme, content posted, purpose, layout, etc. You also still see all the expected bizarre design choices, broken layouts, etc. that one would expect given that. Being able to customize it to a large enough degree to give a sense of one's personality, was one of tumblr's primary appeals to its large younger userbase.

Though it might also be worth mentioning that Tumblr is a total pain in the * to use precisely because of that customization. Every dang page is different and I never know what to click. Worse, Tumblr is so slow that every wrong click is an expensive loss of time and patience. On the rare occasion that I find a Tumblr worth following, I just use the RSS feed because the site is too frustrating.

I actually think Reddit nailed the balance for subreddits[1], even if it is a little more forum-ey than the social sites you mentioned.

I understand that might change soon, which is a shame.

[1] excepting /r/spackd--ks[2], as it always should be.

[2] post.get_opposite("R.I.P.")

I assume the upcoming changes you're talking about are the new "structured styles", which I think are overall a good idea. Ultimately, though, the key remaining question will be if they can balance the need for customization with some level of uniformity. So far they've been very slow with the beta test and appear to be taking feedback into account, which leaves me hopeful that the final result will be a net improvement.

I think that overall it's a good move for Reddit, as the prevalence of pleasant-looking neutral themes like Naut is a good indication that the default is not really good enough anymore. My hope is that the new structured styles will provide a good balance between customizability and clean design that other sites might follow as a lead.

My main complaint with reddit is that there's no real guidance on how to not get a controversial sub banned. It seems like the rule of thumb is don't get discovered by a social justice movement or a major publisher. Not that anything I would call valuable has been lost so far, but it's still a bad precedent.

Most controversial subs which have been banned have been so because the moderators tolerated users' discussions of explicit plans to commit violent crimes; /r/incel is a good example, or because the subreddit organized harassment campaigns, such as with /r/fatpeoplehate. Other subreddits like /r/shitredditsays and /r/the_donald complied with admins' orders to keep their garbage in the dumpster and have been allowed to thrive. Then of course there is the "do not sexualize minors" rule, which I think is quite clear. It's not perfect but there are subreddits which openly advocate eg fascism or communism so the rules do work in some sense. /r/againsthatesubreddits is unintentionally a good catalogue of the ways that the policies allow for more-or-less free expression while safeguarding the site from lawsuits. I find it all grotesquely impressive.

The big 2 that I heard about are the fappening and deepfakes.

Anyone with legal/pr experience care to give us some insight what you think reddits decision to ban those subs was based on (like were they actually illegal or just banned for bringing bad PR)?

I believe the fappening essentially amounted to copyright infringement, since Lawrence owned the rights to the pictures. Deepfakes is a little more questionable, because it's a very strange topic. However, faking a nude photo of someone could essentially be considered equivalent to claiming "this person took a nude photo which looks like this", which, being false, injurious, and appearing in written media, amounts roughly to libel, I believe. But I am not a lawyer so those are poorly-educated guesses.

Well they are not a bastion of free speech... They are a company. Create your own website if you want free speech (as far as you consider it ).

I could have been clearer, I'm aware they're a private company and under no particular obligation to the preservation of free speech principles. My point was that if we're comparing hosting your own site to operating on someone else's platform, it seems like there's marginally more freedom when hosting your own website.

Agreed. There were people who were using templates for their Myspace pages that were hideous. Facebook felt much more uniform and focused on the content (posts) rather than frivolous glitz. But today, I'm off Facebook and any other large centralized social platforms. In the suture if I decide to publish articles or blog posts then I'm going back to the personal web page.

I agree. The end of next neutrality may help here as the big players will get worse and worse as the telcos start taking them.

I need to write a love letter to Flash and how it made every website look like a christmas tree. There was so much life in there, it was a race to dynamism when we didn’t know how to make things dynamic. Now it’s all about flat design and static pages and don’t make the users learn a new UI and use the same CSS framework everybody else is using.

I don't miss Flash but the jaw-dropping impression when visiting Gabo for the first time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y-ESJS911c

Wow, I remember that! I was amazed by it at the time. It was absolutely top notch.

But seeing it now has kind of ruined my memory of it, heh. Like replaying a video game from when I was a kid. But it's interesting to see just how much the standard for design has changed in a relatively short time.

That is sweet! And then there was hell.com and associated sites. But I find no video :( Basically, once you paid $100 to repurchase your soul, you got lifetime access, and a hell.com email address :)

On an unrelated note, that makes me think, why facebook won't make a paid subscription version? I would dearly pay 10-20 bucks per year or whatever they are getting from me and never see ads or get my data shared with advertisers.

Then the people who didn't pay would feel as second-class citizens who can be scrutinized, analyzed, and their profiles sold. That awareness would be deadly for Facebook, because not enough people would be willing to pay.

Advertisers only really care about showing ads to people with enough money to buy their products. An ad-free subscription lets these people remove themselves from the consumer pool, drastically reducing the value of their advertising product. Why take the chance of disrupting a system that's working for them?

Remember me of the Eye4U website as well :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aT4wt0fmGU

Haha that site was what drove me to flash/actionscript. There was another site too that made 3d popular and I got rabbitholed exporting stuff from 3d studio max into flash. Complete waste of time - clients only wanted boring splash screens and you had to talk them out of it.

DVD menus are annoying enough when you're trying to watch a film, and they're supposed to be entertaining. Can you imagine if every website was like that?

It was almost like shortly after stuff like Gabocorp. It became a fad. Websites were adding flash intros like crazy for a while. Music too.

And it was as awful as you imagine.

I am so glad that died. There was a time when you couldn't open most businesses' websites on Linux because flash support was shaky and everyone relied on all of it.

That was some cutting edge stuff

The first 3 times you saw it ;)

Dynamic stuff was in vogue when it was difficult to do. Same with rounded corners. Once stuff gets easy it goes out of fashion.

Hah, flat design and static except for the ads.

Jaron Lanier's "You Are Not a Gadget" has some nice thought about this point, claiming that the web in the 90s was a way more creative and personal space than today.

When I wrote Route50.net with a friend, we tried to keep that somewhat alive - to either good or terrible consequences.

Route50.net has:

* Moveable widgets * Easy theme styling * Optional complete CSS customization

And then, since one of the main points was an artistic gallery - we allowed users to share their CSS in the gallery, and other users could preview it and install it

Ex: http://route50.net/base/navarr http://route50.net/base/navarr?style=12675

I still have that feeling about Facebook. It looks and acts like the central web registry authority.