I concede the point that I am thinking like a technologist, I cannot help it. But it doesn't work to argue that this site which alleges that the 'fun' of the web was in a large part created by "the ability for people (both old and new to the web) to easily create web sites" applies to your 'vast majority.'

> It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are
> more ways to explain the varying quality of community
> sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains.

Yes, Google is more sophisticated about how they derank web sites (I like to think that our small search engine, blekko.com, helped them see how poor their results had become on highly contested searches), but the spammers and the crooks have also upped their game such that many innocent sites get caught in the crossfire. (Google "panda killed my web site" for example). Not to mention the new trend of 'negative SEO' where someone might script a neocities site creator that triggered one of Google's anti-rank defenses and to destroy the organic rank of an otherwise pleasant web site.

> You're also assuming that everybody wants to get
> search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a
> PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What
> if the whole point is to make pages about your
> pet cat, just because?

Actually I'm not making that assumption at all. Facebook pages have a NaN pagerank because facebook has a robots.txt that says "don't crawl us" and legit search engines respect that. Facebook rightly presumes that you will see your friends content because of mechanisms they have in place to put it in front of your eyes. And I also think that people making a page about their pet cat, or their belief in UFOs or whatever is fine and neocities is great for that. I'm just saying that the bad actors won't leave it alone for those people to play in it.

> Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make
> the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off
> NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course
> this could fail utterly as the customers that
> Neocities wants probably don't distinguish
> between URLs and search queries.)

Actually the same people who put their pet pictures up will probably not put meta tags in their HTML. The Neocities folks could put a robots.txt file that excluded search engines (like Facebook does) as well. But think through what you are saying.

The person you want to make this "fun" for is a non-technologist putting up a page about their cat, and for people who are looking for random pages about cats. Or perhaps relatives of that person who say "Hey, Mindy put up a web site for her cat!", "Oh really? What's the address?", "I don't know, just Google 'Mindys Many Cats'", "Thats weird it doesn't find it", "Are you sure you spelled Mindy right?"

You see that non-technical crowd has been trained that Google finds everything, and if it doesn't find neocities websites then the neocities guys have to explain to Mindy why that is, which is going to be a complicated discussion because we've assumed for this discussion that Mindy is non-technical. Of course they could offer that as a pay service but that wouldn't work to well either since Mindy isn't going to put up a website for her cats and pay $1/month to do it.

So the neocities folks could curate the sites, and try to delete sites that are bad (they already do some of that) but that takes people and time. People + time == money, and for a free service money is hard to find. And then they say "Hmm, I wonder if Yahoo shut down Geocities not because they were clueless but instead because they actually started to see what they had gotten into and now they were scared they couldn't keep it going."

There is a whole bunch of "web" below the fun part. That the fun part is lacking is not because Geocities was shuttered.