remembering yoursite.nu
When I was a teenager some time in the 00s, I created a profile for my website on the now defunct review forum yoursite.nu (Wayback Machine link). Having spent a considerable amount of time and effort on my layout, I waited patiently for someone to applaud my image editing skills and ExPeRtLy rendered CSS.
In "meat space," I felt quite lonely. Although I encountered tech savvy teens like me through internet forums, my classmates' relationship to the internet was mostly confined to MySpace. (In my high school yearbook, I'm quoted saying "I like to design websites." This did not make me popular.) It's no wonder why I sought validation for how I spent my time while not at school, while I wasn't around normie squarebears.
When I recieved an email notifying me that someone finally left a review of my website, I was over the moon. Reading the actual review, however, was another experience, as it contained the type of criticism indicative of a transition to a new digital landscape. Some were calling this transition Web 2.0. The reviewer questioned my splash page and explained that resolution and browser requirements were passé. "Your average visitor isn't going to download a new browser or change their display settings just to visit your puny little website, how could you be so delusional and stupid?" is not what they wrote but it's how I remember it. The criticism didn't stop there--"why on God's green earth would you have a scrolling frame instead of an expanding div?" This was also when I learned that some people expected entertainment or useful information from blogs. "The writing is OK," the reviewer continued, giving me the middle finger before kicking me in the face. My blog was full of complaints about homework and adolescent romance--why did this reviewer expect that my blog was for them and not for me, I wondered?
Anyway, it's funny to see personal websites hosted on Neocities adopt the same aesthetic that I was criticized for holding onto in the 00s. Especially when the authors of these sites are ~10 years too young to have experienced that era of the internet. It's validating though, and I like to think that some aspects of this current wave of y2k nostalgia speak to the universality of adolescent experience. Pre-internet, we weren't publishing or accessing each other's diaries. The kids are alright, etc.