I do side-eye the decision to take minors as volunteers — as grateful as I was/am for the experience personally — because even circa 1996 that seems like a questionable idea. (Though in truth, I suppose if there had been an age limit and not a teen sunset program overseen by a nice adult volunteer, I suspect many of the teens would’ve just lied about their age. I know I would have!)
I wanted more space for my website and to give back/learn. This program provided that.
Over the two years I was a volunteer tree, I got an Amazon gift certificate, some GeoCities merch, and some stock that was at one point worth $20,000. I will always be grateful.
I signed up, and the presentation should be a few days later. One or two days later, Oracle called my home and asked to speak with me. It was what my background was, and I told I enjoyed programming and told them my age, explaining I was still going to school.
They said that unfortunately, the event was for grow-ups and that I couldn't attend it. But no worries, when it did an event for kids, they would call me.
Thankfully they never called me back. Now I'm a happy PostgreSQL user and only queried an Oracle database a few times during my bachelor in Computer Sciences because the teacher of database systems forced us to use it.
> January 3, 2000: Yahoo stocks close at an all-time high of $475.00 (pre-split price) a share.
shit hit the fan in 2001
As a former CL what are your thoughts on this text I just copied off the OP-linked page?
I was a teen “community leader” for GeoCities from 1997 - 1999 (from the ages of 14-16), which basically meant I was unpaid tech support who would answer help emails about using GeoCitied and html and going through blocks in my neighborhood to make sure websites didn’t violate the various community guidelines. In exchange I got more space and a custom domain. The problem is my custom username meant my site was never backed up in the GeoCities archived because when Yahoo moved to usernames, there were issues preserving/indexing sole of the old ones. The Wayback Machine has some of the site but not all of it or the images.
I got some free GeoCities stock that became Yahoo stock that became worth $400 a share that my mom wouldn’t let me sell (I was 15 or 16 and it was an etrade custodial account), something that 20 years later I still bitch at my mom about (it was the only time she ever interjected in the managing of my finances).
After Yahoo bought GeoCities, they sent out this survey for the CLs to fill out, asking about community and some product things and thoughts on how they could integrate with Yahoo. I sent some detailed response and was asked to get on a conference call to talk more in-depth. The call went really well and they offered to fly me out to Sunnyvale to discuss more in person/maybe look at a job or some consulting. I was obviously excited, thinking they knew I was a teen CL — I was thinking it would be a cool internship or summer job. When they found out I was 16, the conversation ended and looking back, I get the impression they were embarrassed to be taking feedback from a teenager (today, company’s actively seek that out).
The teen program was ended shortly after — I suppose someone realized it probably wasn’t legal to have minors policing content. The whole CL program was shut down not long after after someone sued Yahoo for employing unpaid labor.
I will always love GeoCities — it was my Introduction not just to building for the web but to online communities in general.