Glitch sounds amazing, and way better than the tools that existed back then.

But back then, Geocities was popular and loads of people had heard of it. I have never heard of Glitch. It seems like there's become a re-division between "people who like to tinker" and "literally everyone else". On the one hand that's great but it kind of feels like everything is AOL again now.

The last vestige of fun, weird and popular is probably Tumblr, which everyone agrees has the absolute worst user interface. But you can theme your Tumblr page to your absolute heart's desire.

There is also https://neocities.org with free static web hosting and zero ads. Many features and tools.

Seems to be down.

The tinkerers were a larger proportion of web users in the 90's and hence had more visibility with their larger share of available content. Now they're drowned by the sea of services for norms to consume.

And seeking them out seems to have gotten harder. I want to see more tinkering!

Gimme some more of that sweet walled garden.

No joke, I do remember when Facebook came onto the scene, I liked it way better than MySpace. I absolutely hated how customized MySpace pages became. It was dreck. Sound would blast when you opened someone's page. You could barely read what was on the page at times. It was occasionally fun but more often than not really terrible.

Reading the article my thought was "one person's fun and weird is another person's loud and obnoxious".

These days people have to focus more on the content because the presentation is so locked down. This may be for the better, but it can definitely feel antiseptic and corporate. The sense of fun is lost.

Where does Facebook offer a place to put "content"? AFAIK You can give them personal info and suggest interesting things, and Facebook decides how, if, or when to present this information, and to whom.

When Myspace came along, it clearly seemed to be the cesspool of the internet; I never created a page and never visited it out of principle. There was nothing I wanted out there.

Facebook's clean design was what I actually wanted. Not some autoplay crap music.

In fact, back in the day, everything in Facebook was a search. I could click on your residence or your class/section and see everyone else in it. It was awesome and useful.

Zuckerberg is apparently red-green colour-blind which influenced FB being all blue. [1]

It also started out simple and therefore there was little to make it cluttered.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-fa...

Samy is still your hero and you know it!

Thank god youtube got rid of that. One day you would browse a dark page, and boom! Searing white at 3AM! But it’s nostalgic.

> [this] shows that the internet is still fun and weird for people that like fun and weird

Does it, though? Google used to give search results, now it gives Google Search Results™ and most navigation is dictated by what appears in social media feeds. The behemoths are able to enforce a sense of legitimacy in their own products while marginalizing any threats to their dominance. If they really can't stop a rising star that is pulling away users by squashing or copying them then it is no issue to throw some money at the problem and buy them out.

But Glitch isn't a way for a normal person to express themselves, is it? Sure, you can write code which can be viewed by everyone, but you can do the same with github, Glitch is mostly only used by programmers, and you can't express yourself through code like you can express yourself through styling your own social media profile.

They put a really strong emphasis on lowering the barrier to entry. While you're right that it still requires you to write code, so did the MySpace weirdness of olde. I think the difference is it allowed you to only write the code, and they would handle the rest.

Normal people already express themselves on mainstream social media, about normal things. Normal people aren't the ones wishing the web was weird and quirky again, and they couldn't care less that Facebook or Twitter doesn't let them customize their CSS.

> you can't express yourself through code

...Bro, do you even code?

Honestly, I can't fathom how you could make such a statement. Granted, most people can't express themselves through code - but that doesn't mean in general you can't.

When I am feeling creative, I need a medium that allows me to keep up the momentum. Coding requires too much thought for my creative process in a visual medium (for exmaple).

Sites like Glitch assume that you already have a good grasp of tech/software engineering.

The big appeal of the early internet was that anyone could make something neat with simple HTML shenanigans, and learn to code by hacking the HTML templates to their needs. Many coders got their start by hacking Neopets storefronts. (there were actual coding puzzles on Neopets too for their events!)

I think it is much easier for a non-technical person to put up a website today than in the 90s. Today you need absolutely zero coding knowledge, not even HTML.

Back in the 90s (at least in the second half) you didn't need how to code. You just used Dreamweaver or Frontpage and you got your site! The only technical bits were to use FTP to upload it to your free hosting provider.

"Glitch is not as popular as My Space was..."

Well, we've only been at this for a little while, and we don't even have a way to follow other people or invite your friends yet. :) Rest assured, we're planning to keep going. And probably with fewer Tila Tequilas, of either the MySpace or neo-nazi variety.

Never knew that site existed!