I've resorted to making my own website so I can express myself as much as possible. I actually have two; one is an actual portfolio for professional use that has more tasteful design choices (while still keeping a good amount of color and expression), and the other, more personal one, is bright pink, CSSed to death, and gay as hell. I just wish I could "embed" that gayness everywhere else lol.
I design website for some clients. The reason why we make website similar to one another is because of the thing called Jakob's Law. Basically, users would prefer a website to work the same way as other website they're familiar with. Which is why you put search bars on top, hamburger bar opens up a menu, etc. But again, this is all to make more profit so yeah. Soulless. Don't become a designer, be an artist. Designers were supposed to be enemy of artists before AI came in. Now it's too late. Everything is minimalistic, low-effort, and soulless.
You can do more customization if you're willing to do some client side stuff. Not everyone can see it, but people who have the same plugin can see it so it's something ig.
@@PastaZ0neAct1 I just wish Discord would stop breaking Better Discord once a week, with the occasional fun ones every couple months or so where it breaks so badly and everyone has to rewrite everything
@@jootersblaccat Ye, the minor ones where it's just a quick reinstall nbd even if it's like a weekly issue at least It sucks, but I don't think there is anything they can do, when Discord changes all their shit like they seem to like to do
something i loved about the old youtube channel layout was that you could watch videos on the channel itself, without having to go to a separate video page
I'm a veteran Tumblrina with a Neocities as well, and while making a Neocities felt sooooo freeing, it's frustrating how Tumblr has gone down the toilet in terms of customization (and yknow, everything else, something something car explosion hammers please). Obviously part of it is the actual UI changes implemented in recent years, but also... I feel like the culture of customization as far as users themselves go has kinda vanished. You mentioned a lot of people left after the "adult content" ban, and I think a lot of theme makers and such left with them. I remember being shocked when I made a new sideblog recently and went to look at themes from some of my favorite theme creators by clicking on the credit link on my other blogs, and half of them were just... dead links. Man :(
worse than this, i am an user who likes to read the reblogs and comments on other people's posts, and too often i find myself going to the /blog address because i can't seem to access anything written by people on that otherwise, so i often end up just staying in the newer page without the customization to access it.
I didn't even leave because of the nsfw ban, I left because of how bad the ads were once Yahoo bought the company, not in quantity, but I stayed on the science side of tumblr and when I'm suddenly being mass recommended promoted posts about some teenage romance filling my feed in-between entomology and climatology posts, I knew I had to leave because bruh
Wii U also had music for everything the fact it had so many Eshop themes was wonderful that along with Miiverse made everything feel like a community but now every game is much more hallow
As a UI/UX designer, I apologize to admit that this was probably caused by my kind. See, artists and designers, while extremely similar, are polar opposites. Artists are very maximalist-all about self-expression. While us designers, is all about getting the point across with as minimum effort as possible. E.g. we both utilize color theory, but artists use colors to represent their feelings/emotions while designers use colors to manipulate people into buying a product. When you think about it, it's a sickening occupation. Simplicity, minimalism and professionalism is the exact opposite of personalization and self-expression. Everything has to conform in order to appeal to the masses. This is why websites use flat design and modern fast food restaurant look bland and soulless. You hire an artist to create your logo and you might get the most expressive, intricate and complex piece of art. You hire a logo designer to create your logo and you might get a bland, soulless, oversimplified, overly glorified symbol/letter. Why did I became this you might ask? Simply put, I failed at art. It sucks that a lot of people who had passion in art who are not good enough to make a living through selling it have to become the corporate version of it in order to not starve. I know a couple of my friends who were great at painting and drawing, yet they had to settle with the career as a graphic/UI designer and create sanitized and soulless products based on what the management wants in order to survive. UI/UX or web designers are probably some of the most worthless individuals to ever exist. An artist can create a beautiful website, a develop can make it work. Just cut out the middleman. When you pay artists enough, we won't need designers.
i actually seriously considered becoming a ui/ux designer but this is one of the reasons why i ultimately decided against it. it's hard for me to force myself to do something when i have no creative freedom. i don't think anyone in this career should feel bad though! we all gotta do what we gotta do to put food on the table.
as a casual artist and someone interested in ui/ux design, i wish they're not mutually exclusive, and i feel they're probably not but latest trends just say they have to be modern ui is much like brutalist architecture imo: it does nothing but look mildly pleasing but more importantly get the job done. there's a priority towards being clear and concise because after all that's what most people are after. this honestly makes sense for most websites, including corporate websites since i feel they can consider any sort of color more than necessary would be immature and they want to maintain an air of professionalism; i can sort of see it in services or goods because it's not strictly necessary, but i still wish more social media allowed you to personalize your stuff more than just a custom bio of at most 180 characters, especially since we're far out of the age of personal websites and forums and in the age of centralized social media yes accessibility is a concern but like you do not need to give everyone full html control of their own pages, just ideally let people set custom colors, banners and backgrounds and layout their page how they want to even if still within the constraints of the software, and for accessibility just add a plain design mode as an optional setting personally while i do still like following ux rules i also tend to go wild on styling things when i both feel like i can, and when it's appropriate to, such as my personal neocities and my wikipedia userpage, and for everything else i try to take the limits of design as far as i could (such as discord bios) tl;dr modern ui design is the digital version of brutalism. there is a time and a place for them but not in social media oh and also more personal websites would be cool anyway, i wish we can bring back the geocities era
@@Melecie"getting the job done" is literally what's been destroying art. Cutting corners in the name of efficiency had snowballed into AI art-putting the lowest amount of effort into something, as long as it "gets the job done" I still think that UI/UX design and design as a whole is a detriment to art. The only reason why I didn't resort to AI art, but instead graphic design, was simply because when I was 14, AI art didn't exist yet. It's basically the same thing, steal graphics from real talented artists, rearrange them a little bit, and boom you got something aesthetically-pleasing. If you wanna bastardize it even more, you have UI design, which takes no skill or talent. I consider my work as a UI designer as completely worthless outside of the corporate setting. At least programmers can code their own games or whatever. But UI designers? We depend on our clients and bosses to give us what they expect from a website. We're just a bunch technicians trained to operate a software like Figma because no one else wants to do it.
@@randymoon if you can be an artist, you should always try to be an artist. I think it should be the default. Society has put too much value on tech, since UI design is a part of it. Anyone can learn how to operate Photoshop or Figma, but not everyone can make art. It takes no skill or talent to become what I am today, but someone who's learning art for 5-10 years may not be able to become an artist. That's what makes artists special. When you create something not because of yourself, but because of what a person wants you to, you're not creating art, you're creating a meaningless, worthless product
@@randymoonI agree that we shouldn't feel bad about taking this career. But we designers should still feel ashamed because we only contribute more money to corporate entities, but nothing of value to the world.
Yahoo! is still _somewhat_ popular in Japan, both as a search engine and an auction website, so I'd bet that's why Geocities didn't shut down there until 2019. With "dumb phones" making a comeback and search engines like Wiby growing in popularity, it would be neat if people made a conscious choice to make websites with fewer features -- no cookies, no social media -- for their interests and passions. Maybe old skool forums -- no likes, no upvoting/downvoting -- can make a bit of a comeback too, at the very least their slower pace would probably be better for everyone's sanity.
@@flow185 : If the growing popularity of a search engine like Wibly is any indication, it's up to individuals what kind of internet they are a part of -- web 3.0 and web3 (and their successors) probably aren't going to disappear, but that doesn't mean web 2.0 can't thrive in its own right. *Edit:* I'd be willing to bet for people that have offline personal pursuits or creative hobbies, a web 2.0 diet would be really beneficial.
I never used these sites that allowed you so much customization, but that pixelated aesthetic, frutiger... is very striking to me, I would like to know how those times were. There's something artistic and empowering about expressing anonymous individuality. Minimalism feels so corporate and soulless.
Art Fight profiles can still very much be customised. It's a niche part of the internet where artist have a 'fight' by drawing each other's characters every july. I just joined and don't know how to make my profile super personalised but I put a gif as my profile picture and it's so good why can't you do that anywhere else? This is why I clicked on this video and I really hope this aesthtic shift will change social media sites and allow me to put my silly little gif as a pfp it would make my life significantly better xd
you have to pay for customization on artfight is the thing. which is fine, considering what artfight is, but it's not a free feature. thought i'd point that out!
I completely agree with "Make the internet weird again", I really miss TH-cam's customisation specifically since that's the site I've spent the most time on in my time on the internet.
Tumblr was the reason I got into UI/UX and web design. I would spend hours scrolling through themes and coding resources, and then coding my own themes. There was a huge community of themers on that site that were insanely talented, most of which have left by now unfortunately. I remember people coding intricate designs for navigation bars and headers, something you seldom see nowadays. The soulless minimalistic style that overtook absolutely every single aspect of social media killed the creativeness of these people, and took away the very reason I liked web design in the first place. Now with every single site wanting to look the same and AI taking over, web design is looking more and more like a thing of the past, and it's sad to see.
Any video on the old internet (including shock sites) would be so good!! I had so much fun coding my SpaceHey last year when I found out about it. I’m bad at keeping up with social media in general, so I don’t use it much, but it’s one of the ones that make me the most excited about posting (and posting creative content)!
Fantastic video, I weep for old internet customization 😭 Especially here on TH-cam, as a graphic designer I know I would have a field day customizing the hell out of my channel theme if we still had all the features we used to have. Really hope that things swing around soon as you predict, we need to bring creativity back both on and off the web! No more corporate blandness, my heart can't take much more lol
You're a graphic designer. Well, I'm a UI designer. I'm supposed to be your worst enemy because we make website clean and responsive, thus making them bland and soulless. UI design is an inherently evil skill to have.
@@KalitayyDude, and I promise I say this with sincerity, I really think you need to talk to someone. You have been all over the place utterly shitting on yourself and it’s really, really unhealthy. And that’s not even going into how UX/UI design absolutely has artistry to it when allowed to (I forget who it is but check out the designer gushing over *just* the stamina wheel from Breath of the Wild). Artists and designers are not polar opposites and your skill set isn’t “evil”. Please, treat yourself better.
I think there are many factors that contribute to it: - it reduces the uniformity of the site and maybe people could get confused on what site they are ob - it can look ugly, I'm sure designers are frustrated when users soil the designs they have made - it is not very flexible. If the designers want to redesign the site because it's been 0.2 seconds since the last design was finished they don't want everyone's old themes to be causing inconcsistencies with the new design. - users can make themes that are make the site unusuable on certain devices / screen dimensions - it's expensive to develop proper customization and there may not be much of a return on investment for doing so especially if not many users even take the time to do customization - user customizations may not be easily adapatable or testable when a site can be accessed from many different kinds of devices. Random users aren't probably not going to be making sure smart tv users are having a good user experience.
@@Kalitayy A broken page has reputational damage for the website itself, and not just the user that made it. While technically a competent artist could be hired by users, in practice many are just going to do things the quick and dirty way and not care about the edge cases.
@@gyroninjamoddernow that you brought edge cases, an UI/UX designer's job is to handle edge cases. But do you think average users care about them? All I'm seeing is that users just want beautiful websites
@@gyroninjamodder Your entire spiel basically only applies in the current regime. Nobody treated a bad myspace page like it was myspace's fault, because we understood that each page was customized. And if the designers know customization is a core feature, they're not going to get arbitrarily butthurt when people use that feature.
@@seigeengine Yes, it applies to the current times because everyone's standards have increased by a lot. And due to competition it's hard to go to a solution that is worse. Now these platforms are mainstream and are used by a very wide demographics of people. Everyone from kids to elderly people who don't know how to use a computer are expected to be able to use it.
A few years back I had an account on this thing called Everskies. It’s like a social media, blog space and game all in the same time, you could customize your own avatar, profile (with gifs, music, crazy backgrounds and all that), play mini games and talk with other people. I’m a teenage part of Gen-Z, so I haven’t lived to see all those crazy customizable profiles, but I love customize everything so I do yearn for things like that, sometimes. Great video ! edited: just created a spacehey account lol
I could not agree more with this, it's insane how corporate and cold everything got. Like here's the one of the world's more customizable platform for expression but you're not allowed to customize anything without getting really technical. Some friends and I were going to make a neocity but since we had some basic web development knowledge it ended up just turning into a fully-fledged website and art blog. We even have a live radio. It has honestly been one of the best projects I've ever worked on and I wish stuff like this was more accessible to people in as big a way as it used to be - Yeebus
Facebook has never been big on customization, but a HUGE point of nostalgia for me is being a little kid with a Facebook my sister made me and browsing Bumper Stickers and Flair. Bumper Stickers were these square images you could add to your profile, usually silly aphorisms or early memes. Flair was presented as a big cork board that you could pin button-shaped images to. I don't know when they got rid of them, but I wish I could look back at the Flair board I had when I was too young to be on the internet. It was probably just like, the Star Wars logo and Pikachu and a bunch of images blandly representing things I liked, but that was such a huge first form of expression for me as a kid. I never see anyone talk about Flair, and the only things I can find about it online are people missing it. TH-cam's customization is also sorely missed. I'm old enough that a video website was amazing to me, but young enough that TH-cam has been a major entertainment source for me for almost twenty years. If a website or video game gives me something to customize, I WILL do it and grind for more customization options.
Thank you for bringing up Flair! I feel like no one talks about the stuff that used to be on Facebook. I have so much nostalgia for things like Food Fight, where you could " purchase" different things and throw them at your friend's pages, or the little rabbit widget you put on your page and deck out in armor. I had almost convinced myself I had made up all these different games and things you could add to your profile. I really feel like things started to go downhill when they got rid of them. :(
@@syrup_n_waffles DESPERATELY do I miss silly little pre-smart phone, pre-microtransaction widgets and virtual pets. Google used to, a thousand years ago, let you set a custom version of the Google search page (I think called My Google?) where kid me LOADED it with virtual pets and useless little toys.
A little note on the ps5, you can customize the console as the white ps5 is the default but you can remove the plates for other colors. But regardless the ps5 is still a good example because the console itself does not have themes or anything unlike the ps4 and 3 which did.
I LOVE UR GLASSES + thank U for showing me neocities. I've been looking at platforms like it (SpaceHey etc) and none of them have felt very cohesive to me but neocities seems to scratch my personalization itch. It's really sad to see modern social media strip people of who they want to express themselves as (on the platform), and favoring instead to value the numbers or content itself. There's a topic I've been experimenting with music lately of "context", how notes or phrases fall in line and not just what they are. Context is vital because any piece or phrase can be a good one, but it might not be the right one for what's around it. Since apps like Instagram don't have any way of contextualizing your content, your content becomes the context. Instead of expressing what you want to express I see many people expressing what fits the context of the other things they posted. It's really difficult for me to be on these apps and see my friends being displayed instead of expressing themselves.
I started to have this realization after I played HypnoSpace Outlaw. It put the entire experience and the vast difference in how the internet used to be in stark perspective for me.
As someone with a SpaceHey and a Neocities site, it feels so weird using social media with just... blank backgrounds and subscription services everywhere. Literally the only ones I can tolerate using post-spacehey-signup are youtube (ofc), pinterest and tumblr because memes and fandom spaces. Also, a bonus I've noticed is that updating my neocities site and changing stuff about is kinda like studying for my software development course that's starting soon. It's nice being able to prepare in advance with a project I'm passionate about.
This is my first time watching your content and I love how you link to modern recreations of old sites! It’s nice to see niche communities still existing and bringing back the spirit of what’s lost
I miss 2011 TH-cam. One of my goals back then was to become a TH-cam partner just so I could have a channel banner lol. I also miss it when tumblr had more people on it. The website has so many great features, it stinks that it's been largely abandoned.
This came at a perfect time as I just recently have gotten obsessed with neocities. I also love customization, from stickers on my water bottle and laptop, constantly changing phone case, and growing pin/button collection on my backpack
Making a Neocities page has been a lot of fun and a great way to understanding html more. I really like having full control over everything that goes on my blog. Its honestly been really fun and it really inspires me to be more creative. I love when someone says they looked at my blog because I'm really proud of it and it makes the frustration and time I spent on it feel worth it. I just wish more people were on there!
Wonderful video! While I wasn’t old enough to have social media accounts during the ‘90s - ‘00s, I remember browsing the Internet a ton, and I remember it just felt so much more vibrant. Websites all felt so unique and distinct from one another. I hope that the push back in that direction really takes shape, I really miss that personal touch everything used to have!
I've never heard of the DS themes and they look amazing!! I would kill for those to be on the switch- I want a splatoon one with new sound effects for when you press things, aaaaa i'd love it! They've been adding customization for your profile picture on the switch (at a snail's pace, but hey), so I can be hopeful they'll add new themes.. eventually. You can currently only use platinum points to get pfp characters that weren't available by default, and also get them frames and backgrounds but that's it so far. The themes part of the settings looks so empty without more colors, it's just light and dark mode! I'd love a pale green version or something if game-inspired themes are beyond them -0-
Just discovered your channel today, great vid btw! I wasn't in the internet during the 2000's and early 2010's but recently discovering how so much things are limited by corporations in the internet and computers in general is really just crazy. In the last months I discovered about the FLOSS community and it's amazing how much people are eager to customize and make the internet a place of art and communities and individualization, while corporations are literally addicting and tracking it's users for greed again, great video :v
I’ve been on SpaceHey since it’s launch, modern SpaceHey is a mess which only thrives off the name of a platform it will never live up to, I would recommend you leave it as soon as you can
OMG THIS IS THE BEST. I love customisation sooo much especially on social media accounts. I love being able to change the colours of things, add fonts and gifs/pics which is why i’m still so drawn to things like tumblr. I literally hate minimalist designs so much and how everything is so bland now. I’ve been looking for a video covering this for ages ur my saviour 🙏 also u give me funkyfrogbait vibes! (huge compliment)
As an artist, I can say I really appreciate the toy house website for how customizable it can be! As well as the art fight website. While both are for mainly artists- especially those who mostly make original characters, many people still customize their accounts! It’s lots of fun to see, and I’ve actually been having a blast recently using BBCodes to customize my personal account with gifs, fonts, colors, and silly pngs💖💖💖 I’ve tbh never been online except for on those websites and TH-cam, so I didn’t realize what I was seeing used to be very common! Now I have more of an appreciation for it, and hope to see more customization on other sites and apps! It’s just very sweet and fun to see everyone putting their own personal touch to their accounts- you can rally tell how much effort and love they put into it!
Tumblr had kind of a revival the last few years, especially for teenagers. I'm fourteen, I've been on Tumblr for about a year and most (if not all) of my mutuals are ppl around my age. There's a lot of full-grown adults on there but there's also a little group of teenagers just having fun in a corner. Tumblr is probably the social media I use and enjoy the most, even if it's not popular anymore and most people my age don't know about its existence, actually I think that's what makes the experience better since it creates a sense of comunity most other social media platforms don't have.
discovering neocities a few months ago was my saving grace! been learning html ever since. it's so refreshing to have a personal hub different from all the monotone "linktrees" and to be able to make your website an art piece by itself.
I'm on a "old internet" deepdive right now and I really liked this video ^^ I didn't grow up with the boom of customizability on the web cause I was sorta busy being a baby in the 2000s but still being able to learn a coding program and make cool things is so fun :D and the fact that there are people that still craze that tackiness, not even purely for nostalgia because there are young people also getting into it these days too. i hope the chaos of the early internet always has a place on the web for freaks and geeks to hang out peacefully :3
Impossible to watch this ant not think about the incredible game "Hypnospace Outlaw". Makes me realize how much the game resembles actual internet history
This is Livejournal erasure lol. The customization options and layout designer community were quite crazy, and it's something Tumblr inherited a part of it after the Russians bought the website and most of us migrated from it to Tumblr if not to their clones (Dreamwidth tried, bless). There was also things like uploading multiple pfps (or icons, as they called them) and customized mood themes. Every blog post you could choose your mood from a list (which would show the image matching said mood) and the icon you wanted to show, making each post more unique and expressive. Also, you could choose icons when you posted a comment to someone else, which was a super fun feature! To match what you were saying with a certain pfp was so good that a lot of users dedicated themselves to make batches of 100 pixels x 100 pixels icons of their interests to share with the rest of Livejournal. There were icons/mood sets/layout communities, contests, etc., some even dedicated to specific fandoms. It was almost as important as a fanwork as fanart and fanfiction. I honestly really miss it. It was less cringe or "web design is my passion" than MySpace but more chaotic than Tumblr. I learned a lot of HTML/CSS and basic image edition (which is now a bit unusable because we moved on to HTML 5/CSS 3 and there's 0 use for those old 100x100 brushes) thanks to Livejournal. That said, I also would make fansites back in the day (at first on Tripod because it had more storage space than Geocities, then on my own domain paying hosting) and spend a couple of years on Blogspot before moving to Livejournal which scratched the social interaction itch much better.
I've recently been trying to recapture this early 2000s internet style that I was too young to fully enjoy, and I have to say neocities is by far the best way to do it, just scrolling through the main page I'm hit with a wave of nostalgia. I also recommend the 88x31 gif collection for some good y2k web building assets
Neocities sounds cool! I still play Neopets to this day, and I remember learning basic html to be able to customize pet pages and my shop back in the day!
insta sub i love this and it just started. customisation is one of the reasons i used to make carrds a while back even tho they serve 0 purpose because of me not being famous or whatever and it not being an actual "social" site.
0:12 omg i wanna do this lol! i already have my so many sketchbooks covered in stickers.. but the problem is it's considered "cringe" now to do :( what should I do
as a former "weird kid" in my middle school and high school days, I really miss logging into deviantart to customize the stamps on my profile or other fonts and such, and then later on migrating over to Tumblr where sometimes I would just spend an entire evening getting cozy and customizing my entire profile top to bottom with theme codes and such for hours.... good memories
Bring back old forums!!!! I just discovered your channel and absolutely love it. One of my hobbies is finding old fan-translation forums for early 2000's visual novels. It's so sad that the introduction to AI-translation and the death of forums has killed this niche community. I hope we can bring that type of energy back one day, personalization was the best part of the internet back then, bring back desktop accessories and social media platforms that don't make every page look the same!
i was introduced to neocities by youtuber named dimwit, i was so in love and felt a lot of nostalgia for old style internet even though i wasnt born or too young to experience it lol. ive been heavily considering leaving instagram and tiktok and posting everything on a neocities blog but i think im too lazy to do that for now lmao
I’m 16, and for the most part I’ve grown up on the modern internet. But, I’m also a digital artist. Digital artists, like myself, don’t really *have* websites just for us (that are on the modern side, anyways) and so I recently began using sites like Toyhouse & Artfight. I started customizing my accounts with HTML, with stamps & gifs from deviantart/tumblr!!! It’s genuinely the most fun I’ve had on the internet. I would absolutely love to see old web styled customization come back in a more modernized, moderated way. I’m definitely checking out the sites you’d listed (the ones still around, anyways 😭)
I think this is why I was so obsessed with Instagram stories for a couple years. I could add images, gifs, music, filters. It was a breath of fresh air and I'd always watch my own stuff until it disappeared after 24 hs
i feel like customization brings up engagement and makes using sites less of a viewer/creator experience, since people have their own input on their pages.
Been on the internet since we got AOL in the 90s and I would patiently wait 15 minutes for fan sites covered with photos to load (only to have someone pick up the phone and disconnect me). What I miss about the era is that customization and little Geocities pages encouraged people to build for the web themselves and learn some code. It’s still possible but web design has gotten so professionalized that a lot of “basic” sites require a much steeper learning curve to make if you want to code one. And the result of that is everything has been locked behind walled gardens of a few major tech companies so stumbling on new things and communities has become harder and fandom-driven. This has gone hand in hand with the appification of everything where device OS design increasingly gets in the way of users being able to explore settings, the file system, etc leading to a phenomenon where people have observed younger generations actually having less basic tech knowledge.
i left most social media just because i was getting tired of all the short videos like reels and tiktok and now im mostly on youtube and spacehey, things are chill ^_^
This, so this. Thanks for highlighting the history and fading. I hope it returns in full force. I had a blog for years and stopped for some reason. I used to run portals even in the 90s to mid 2000s. Need to reboot that web presence!
FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS. But forreal. I made a MySpace just after it's heyday when Facebook was just starting to get big (I'm 26, got unrestricted access to my own desktop computer when I was 9 lol). Even if it wasn't the most active, 90% of my time was spent on customization of my profile. I'd change it or add to it just for fun, and the rest of my time I spent browsing indie musicians and listening to songs that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to find again. My early internet experiences as a precocious kid are ones I cherish tbh. My main haunts were fan forums, and I learned to make gifs just so I could have the profile I wanted lol. When I finally gave in and got a Facebook, I was so disappointed. I remember for a long time using some kind of plug-in that gave me some customization, but of course I was the only one that could see it. I was also very drawn to Tumblr and spent a lot of time customizing there as well. My original Tumblr blog is long gone, but I'm still a daily active user on there. That's... Mostly because I only go on tumblr and TH-cam now lmao (though I'll probably try out spacehey and make a neocities now lmao). I think because I had formative experiences on the early web before everyone had a smartphone, but saw that immediately get demolished within a couple years has left me like some kind of wandering species with no internet home lmao. I am ill-adapted to the modern environment and yell at clouds from my dying platform lmao. OH. AND THE DEVICES. I'm so tired of everything only coming in black, Grey, or white. For a while I was at a point that a phone coming in navy blue seemed like a miracle. I remember always thinking I would have the quirky girl laptop in a bright color with stickers like yours, but until I was 18 my parents wouldn't let me pick my own laptop, and by the time I could get my own they were all BORING I really hope you're right and that we swing hard the other way. I want my pretty colors and customization back. You know the ps4 also had themes like the 3ds did? And the ps5 didn't? Outrage. Can't believe the plot of DeBlob for the Wii was an omen afafsgsh
in regards to the macbook statement, i feel like something that other brands missed when moving to more greyscale colors was the element of self expression apple embraced, with stickers etc on the back of macbooks and the glowing apple, even to this day apple still embrace stickers on their laptops iirc, whereas i dont think ive really seen a whole lot of encouragement in regards to that from other brands. A lot of companies seem way too caught up on this overly simple corporate look and its a shame that it has to pour into things that arent necessarily corporate in nature, social media doesnt need to look sleek and professional its there for you to express yourself
thanks for this video. i was a myspace addict. i have memories of going to my friends houses with computers to spend all my time on myspace. it was a wild time. love the little dose of nostalgia. i'm 33 now, and the sanitzed internet is all fake news
my god seeing youtube slowly devolve in terms of customization was so painful to watch. it went from being able to give your own channel its own personality and theme to being able to change its color to only really being able to change banner and profile pic. just why? why throw away all of that? the site is just so sterile and bland now.
Don't really use social media at all, but made a spacehey after watching cause why not. In my quest to get everbody's circulation to play into the bee movie script with my complete lack of HTML knowledge, I got 2 tiny copies of mandalore gaming's mystery of the droods review playing *very* slightly out of sync instead. It syncs back up if you mute and unmute the tab, but think I'm either gonna leave it as it, or start 1 copy 1 second ahead of the other, cause that seems really funny to me.
I’m doing this thing this month called art fight and you’re able to customize your profile! I customized mine and it was so much fun! I was able to put gifs, stickers, photos I got to do anything I wanted. I wish there was more things like this nowadays.
Here are my other theories: 1. If people spend too much time on customization they will spend less time on their feeds where the ads are which is how these social media companies make money 2. The simplicity of the interface and lack of customization makes it easier and less daunting for new users to sign up and gets them to start looking at their feeds (i.e. ads) quicker 3. I wouldn’t be surprised if these companies have done studies that show that too many choices may overwhelm the average person, decreasing new users That all being said, i love customization and i think that platforms where customization was one of the huge selling points will only hurt themselves by removing those features.
youtube was a hard hit, loved to make banners and backgrounds for everything, changing my cursor, adding full glass themes for w7 and changing the media player skin and other gadgets, it was a waste of time but, I think now it's just too impersonal and the reason why trends come and go so fast, like you can't really get into nothing at all unless your'e kinda radical geek.
Yeah, tbh it's so depressing all the "popular" apps are so bland looking. I wish there was more customizing... MySpace sounds so cool. I've recently been doing spacehey and it's pretty fun! But I wish I was on the real myspace in its prime Yk? I'm hoping that we bring back colorful fun customizable apps/websites!!
I had an old Tumblr account that I used to edit the HMTL (that's how I started my career in web developing) then a couple of years back, I've created a new account, since my old one was long gone, and I could not find a way to edit as I used to and so I ended up giving up. I saw a couple of customized blogs but thought that they were only retrofitted from older versions or whatever... Only now I found out that it's still possible to customize it!
Tumblr still exists and you can customize your blog til your hearts content, but they make it awkward for anyone to actually access your blog as a webpage
When it comes to YT I miss linked video replies. Very early on it used to have them. Was similar to TikTok stitches, but better since all replies were linked under the video.
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wow thank you for the neocities and spacehey recomendations, it's just what i was looking for. And big "hello world" from an old blogger from Argentina.
I’ll still never forgive everyone for jumping ship over to Facebook. I tried to fight it back in the day as hard as I could. I made a Facebook eventually, but never went on it. Eventually deleted it and have never made another. MySpace was SO much fun with its customization! I just can’t fathom why everyone wanted Facebook instead, it was so stupid to me. I wish we could bring it back to all its former glory. I html’d the sh-t out of my page for hours teaching myself how to code by reading the existing code from a layout that I downloaded and tweaking certain strings of text in it to see what worked and what didn’t. I loved it.
this is exactly why i love bandcamp. I don't know how its lasted this long, but you can make it look as maximalist and insane as you want or don't want to. this has resulted into times where you can run into crazy maximalist profiles with flashy backgrounds and bright colours a lot.
I miss profile customization so so SO much! I still look for how much you can do with a profile when I sign up for some new social media and I feel old for that lol. Because some younger people don't care as much, but that is because they cannot understand what they haven't seen. I was happy to hear about spacehey though and thinking about joining because of the nostalgia :)
The internet is so boring now sometimes, it’s like having a designer standing over you being like “now we can’t have TOO much fun”
I've resorted to making my own website so I can express myself as much as possible. I actually have two; one is an actual portfolio for professional use that has more tasteful design choices (while still keeping a good amount of color and expression), and the other, more personal one, is bright pink, CSSed to death, and gay as hell. I just wish I could "embed" that gayness everywhere else lol.
omg hi lexi!
That feeling when you put so much s*** to your MySpace page it takes 10 minutes to load was magnificent 😊
Designers then: "lets add some stuff"
Designers now: "lets delete some stuff"
Ohmygod hi Lexi :3
I just miss the Internet being a far more diverse (in website terms) place, everything being 5 websites that try to look like each other is sad.
Every app is trying to be tiktok 💀
I would gladly take more shock sites if it meant the internet had more personality again.
I design website for some clients. The reason why we make website similar to one another is because of the thing called Jakob's Law. Basically, users would prefer a website to work the same way as other website they're familiar with. Which is why you put search bars on top, hamburger bar opens up a menu, etc.
But again, this is all to make more profit so yeah. Soulless. Don't become a designer, be an artist. Designers were supposed to be enemy of artists before AI came in. Now it's too late. Everything is minimalistic, low-effort, and soulless.
And now they want ai assistants to be the one to go to place for all information 😭
Y'all BitView is right there
I immediately thought of discord but... You have to be rich af to customise your profile, and it doesn't even look that good...
You can do more customization if you're willing to do some client side stuff. Not everyone can see it, but people who have the same plugin can see it so it's something ig.
@@PastaZ0neAct1 I just wish Discord would stop breaking Better Discord once a week, with the occasional fun ones every couple months or so where it breaks so badly and everyone has to rewrite everything
@@bubbadoo10 Yeah, I stopped using better discord because of that. I enjoyed using it, but it just breaks literally all the time
@@jootersblaccat Ye, the minor ones where it's just a quick reinstall nbd even if it's like a weekly issue at least
It sucks, but I don't think there is anything they can do, when Discord changes all their shit like they seem to like to do
If you want to learn html, there's neocities at least
going on the internet used to feel like going on an adventure. now it feels like walking thru a hospital
woah you what are you doing here
something i loved about the old youtube channel layout was that you could watch videos on the channel itself, without having to go to a separate video page
you could also search for videos inside of the channel as well
@@sunsetman22 you can still do that
Or that you could leave messages on their community section, or PM them, I did that so many times with people at the time.
@@Badusername2000 not on the mobile app :( or at least I don't know how
@@Pherioxus Yesss, the PM feature was actually nice 🥺
Edit: And I loved the channel comments too!
I'm a veteran Tumblrina with a Neocities as well, and while making a Neocities felt sooooo freeing, it's frustrating how Tumblr has gone down the toilet in terms of customization (and yknow, everything else, something something car explosion hammers please). Obviously part of it is the actual UI changes implemented in recent years, but also... I feel like the culture of customization as far as users themselves go has kinda vanished. You mentioned a lot of people left after the "adult content" ban, and I think a lot of theme makers and such left with them. I remember being shocked when I made a new sideblog recently and went to look at themes from some of my favorite theme creators by clicking on the credit link on my other blogs, and half of them were just... dead links. Man :(
worse than this, i am an user who likes to read the reblogs and comments on other people's posts, and too often i find myself going to the /blog address because i can't seem to access anything written by people on that otherwise, so i often end up just staying in the newer page without the customization to access it.
@@Wilker_uwu I hate the /blog address so much I still remember how angry I was when they introduced it
I didn't even leave because of the nsfw ban, I left because of how bad the ads were once Yahoo bought the company, not in quantity, but I stayed on the science side of tumblr and when I'm suddenly being mass recommended promoted posts about some teenage romance filling my feed in-between entomology and climatology posts, I knew I had to leave because bruh
i'm so glad you mentioned 3ds customisation, i really love the options that are out there for that now. the switch really dropped the ball on that
Wii U also had music for everything the fact it had so many Eshop themes was wonderful that along with Miiverse made everything feel like a community but now every game is much more hallow
The fact we can’t even create a pfp on the switch from assets from different games drives me insane, LET ME COMBINE MY MARIO AND SPLATOON ICONS
Also, 360 and PS3 had these type of customizations as well and they were pretty awesome.
As a UI/UX designer, I apologize to admit that this was probably caused by my kind. See, artists and designers, while extremely similar, are polar opposites.
Artists are very maximalist-all about self-expression. While us designers, is all about getting the point across with as minimum effort as possible. E.g. we both utilize color theory, but artists use colors to represent their feelings/emotions while designers use colors to manipulate people into buying a product. When you think about it, it's a sickening occupation.
Simplicity, minimalism and professionalism is the exact opposite of personalization and self-expression. Everything has to conform in order to appeal to the masses. This is why websites use flat design and modern fast food restaurant look bland and soulless.
You hire an artist to create your logo and you might get the most expressive, intricate and complex piece of art. You hire a logo designer to create your logo and you might get a bland, soulless, oversimplified, overly glorified symbol/letter.
Why did I became this you might ask? Simply put, I failed at art. It sucks that a lot of people who had passion in art who are not good enough to make a living through selling it have to become the corporate version of it in order to not starve. I know a couple of my friends who were great at painting and drawing, yet they had to settle with the career as a graphic/UI designer and create sanitized and soulless products based on what the management wants in order to survive.
UI/UX or web designers are probably some of the most worthless individuals to ever exist. An artist can create a beautiful website, a develop can make it work. Just cut out the middleman. When you pay artists enough, we won't need designers.
i actually seriously considered becoming a ui/ux designer but this is one of the reasons why i ultimately decided against it. it's hard for me to force myself to do something when i have no creative freedom. i don't think anyone in this career should feel bad though! we all gotta do what we gotta do to put food on the table.
as a casual artist and someone interested in ui/ux design, i wish they're not mutually exclusive, and i feel they're probably not but latest trends just say they have to be
modern ui is much like brutalist architecture imo: it does nothing but look mildly pleasing but more importantly get the job done. there's a priority towards being clear and concise because after all that's what most people are after.
this honestly makes sense for most websites, including corporate websites since i feel they can consider any sort of color more than necessary would be immature and they want to maintain an air of professionalism; i can sort of see it in services or goods because it's not strictly necessary, but i still wish more social media allowed you to personalize your stuff more than just a custom bio of at most 180 characters, especially since we're far out of the age of personal websites and forums and in the age of centralized social media
yes accessibility is a concern but like you do not need to give everyone full html control of their own pages, just ideally let people set custom colors, banners and backgrounds and layout their page how they want to even if still within the constraints of the software, and for accessibility just add a plain design mode as an optional setting
personally while i do still like following ux rules i also tend to go wild on styling things when i both feel like i can, and when it's appropriate to, such as my personal neocities and my wikipedia userpage, and for everything else i try to take the limits of design as far as i could (such as discord bios)
tl;dr modern ui design is the digital version of brutalism. there is a time and a place for them but not in social media
oh and also more personal websites would be cool anyway, i wish we can bring back the geocities era
@@Melecie"getting the job done" is literally what's been destroying art. Cutting corners in the name of efficiency had snowballed into AI art-putting the lowest amount of effort into something, as long as it "gets the job done"
I still think that UI/UX design and design as a whole is a detriment to art. The only reason why I didn't resort to AI art, but instead graphic design, was simply because when I was 14, AI art didn't exist yet. It's basically the same thing, steal graphics from real talented artists, rearrange them a little bit, and boom you got something aesthetically-pleasing. If you wanna bastardize it even more, you have UI design, which takes no skill or talent.
I consider my work as a UI designer as completely worthless outside of the corporate setting. At least programmers can code their own games or whatever. But UI designers? We depend on our clients and bosses to give us what they expect from a website. We're just a bunch technicians trained to operate a software like Figma because no one else wants to do it.
@@randymoon if you can be an artist, you should always try to be an artist. I think it should be the default. Society has put too much value on tech, since UI design is a part of it. Anyone can learn how to operate Photoshop or Figma, but not everyone can make art. It takes no skill or talent to become what I am today, but someone who's learning art for 5-10 years may not be able to become an artist. That's what makes artists special. When you create something not because of yourself, but because of what a person wants you to, you're not creating art, you're creating a meaningless, worthless product
@@randymoonI agree that we shouldn't feel bad about taking this career. But we designers should still feel ashamed because we only contribute more money to corporate entities, but nothing of value to the world.
I'm really happy, at almost 40, to see there are still weird kids like I was, and still am, around. I thoroughly enjoy what you do Randy!
Yahoo! is still _somewhat_ popular in Japan, both as a search engine and an auction website, so I'd bet that's why Geocities didn't shut down there until 2019. With "dumb phones" making a comeback and search engines like Wiby growing in popularity, it would be neat if people made a conscious choice to make websites with fewer features -- no cookies, no social media -- for their interests and passions. Maybe old skool forums -- no likes, no upvoting/downvoting -- can make a bit of a comeback too, at the very least their slower pace would probably be better for everyone's sanity.
I would love this tbh
Thats never gonna happen
It would be a net money loss.
Its not.fun but the big reason why thr internet is like that is money
@@flow185 : If the growing popularity of a search engine like Wibly is any indication, it's up to individuals what kind of internet they are a part of -- web 3.0 and web3 (and their successors) probably aren't going to disappear, but that doesn't mean web 2.0 can't thrive in its own right.
*Edit:* I'd be willing to bet for people that have offline personal pursuits or creative hobbies, a web 2.0 diet would be really beneficial.
The last sentence, definitely
I never used these sites that allowed you so much customization, but that pixelated aesthetic, frutiger... is very striking to me, I would like to know how those times were. There's something artistic and empowering about expressing anonymous individuality. Minimalism feels so corporate and soulless.
Try Spacehey. I tried it because I missed those days & it delivers but I'm way to old now to relate to anyone there lol.
There is a myspace copycat called spacehey if you’d like to experience it
Frutiger Aero was not a pixelated aesthetic. If that's what you see, you are looking at a low resolution image.
@@Signalhead Haha, i know. I was just referring to the old internet.
Art Fight profiles can still very much be customised. It's a niche part of the internet where artist have a 'fight' by drawing each other's characters every july. I just joined and don't know how to make my profile super personalised but I put a gif as my profile picture and it's so good why can't you do that anywhere else? This is why I clicked on this video and I really hope this aesthtic shift will change social media sites and allow me to put my silly little gif as a pfp it would make my life significantly better xd
Yet another commie site for losers. Neeeext
artfight mentioned !!! ,,,!!!!1!!!!2!🎉🎉
you have to pay for customization on artfight is the thing. which is fine, considering what artfight is, but it's not a free feature. thought i'd point that out!
@@charlotties_ oh thank you for clarifying i didn't know that
The internet is no longer ours.
I completely agree with "Make the internet weird again", I really miss TH-cam's customisation specifically since that's the site I've spent the most time on in my time on the internet.
Tumblr was the reason I got into UI/UX and web design. I would spend hours scrolling through themes and coding resources, and then coding my own themes. There was a huge community of themers on that site that were insanely talented, most of which have left by now unfortunately. I remember people coding intricate designs for navigation bars and headers, something you seldom see nowadays. The soulless minimalistic style that overtook absolutely every single aspect of social media killed the creativeness of these people, and took away the very reason I liked web design in the first place. Now with every single site wanting to look the same and AI taking over, web design is looking more and more like a thing of the past, and it's sad to see.
I love how you intensely look at me through my screen
Any video on the old internet (including shock sites) would be so good!! I had so much fun coding my SpaceHey last year when I found out about it. I’m bad at keeping up with social media in general, so I don’t use it much, but it’s one of the ones that make me the most excited about posting (and posting creative content)!
Fantastic video, I weep for old internet customization 😭 Especially here on TH-cam, as a graphic designer I know I would have a field day customizing the hell out of my channel theme if we still had all the features we used to have. Really hope that things swing around soon as you predict, we need to bring creativity back both on and off the web! No more corporate blandness, my heart can't take much more lol
You're a graphic designer. Well, I'm a UI designer. I'm supposed to be your worst enemy because we make website clean and responsive, thus making them bland and soulless. UI design is an inherently evil skill to have.
@@KalitayyDude, and I promise I say this with sincerity, I really think you need to talk to someone. You have been all over the place utterly shitting on yourself and it’s really, really unhealthy.
And that’s not even going into how UX/UI design absolutely has artistry to it when allowed to (I forget who it is but check out the designer gushing over *just* the stamina wheel from Breath of the Wild). Artists and designers are not polar opposites and your skill set isn’t “evil”.
Please, treat yourself better.
I think there are many factors that contribute to it:
- it reduces the uniformity of the site and maybe people could get confused on what site they are ob
- it can look ugly, I'm sure designers are frustrated when users soil the designs they have made
- it is not very flexible. If the designers want to redesign the site because it's been 0.2 seconds since the last design was finished they don't want everyone's old themes to be causing inconcsistencies with the new design.
- users can make themes that are make the site unusuable on certain devices / screen dimensions
- it's expensive to develop proper customization and there may not be much of a return on investment for doing so especially if not many users even take the time to do customization
- user customizations may not be easily adapatable or testable when a site can be accessed from many different kinds of devices. Random users aren't probably not going to be making sure smart tv users are having a good user experience.
Random users might not be able to do it, but they can certainly hire someone who can do it for them: artists.
@@Kalitayy A broken page has reputational damage for the website itself, and not just the user that made it. While technically a competent artist could be hired by users, in practice many are just going to do things the quick and dirty way and not care about the edge cases.
@@gyroninjamoddernow that you brought edge cases, an UI/UX designer's job is to handle edge cases. But do you think average users care about them? All I'm seeing is that users just want beautiful websites
@@gyroninjamodder Your entire spiel basically only applies in the current regime.
Nobody treated a bad myspace page like it was myspace's fault, because we understood that each page was customized.
And if the designers know customization is a core feature, they're not going to get arbitrarily butthurt when people use that feature.
@@seigeengine Yes, it applies to the current times because everyone's standards have increased by a lot. And due to competition it's hard to go to a solution that is worse. Now these platforms are mainstream and are used by a very wide demographics of people. Everyone from kids to elderly people who don't know how to use a computer are expected to be able to use it.
A few years back I had an account on this thing called Everskies. It’s like a social media, blog space and game all in the same time, you could customize your own avatar, profile (with gifs, music, crazy backgrounds and all that), play mini games and talk with other people. I’m a teenage part of Gen-Z, so I haven’t lived to see all those crazy customizable profiles, but I love customize everything so I do yearn for things like that, sometimes. Great video !
edited: just created a spacehey account lol
this video made me go on neocities, make a 00s-looking blog from scratch, & indulge my inner child with lots and lots of blinkies. thanks
I could not agree more with this, it's insane how corporate and cold everything got. Like here's the one of the world's more customizable platform for expression but you're not allowed to customize anything without getting really technical. Some friends and I were going to make a neocity but since we had some basic web development knowledge it ended up just turning into a fully-fledged website and art blog. We even have a live radio. It has honestly been one of the best projects I've ever worked on and I wish stuff like this was more accessible to people in as big a way as it used to be
- Yeebus
just checked it out! really cool stuff
Everskies feels very myspace-y in its customizability too which I love
Facebook has never been big on customization, but a HUGE point of nostalgia for me is being a little kid with a Facebook my sister made me and browsing Bumper Stickers and Flair. Bumper Stickers were these square images you could add to your profile, usually silly aphorisms or early memes. Flair was presented as a big cork board that you could pin button-shaped images to. I don't know when they got rid of them, but I wish I could look back at the Flair board I had when I was too young to be on the internet. It was probably just like, the Star Wars logo and Pikachu and a bunch of images blandly representing things I liked, but that was such a huge first form of expression for me as a kid. I never see anyone talk about Flair, and the only things I can find about it online are people missing it.
TH-cam's customization is also sorely missed. I'm old enough that a video website was amazing to me, but young enough that TH-cam has been a major entertainment source for me for almost twenty years. If a website or video game gives me something to customize, I WILL do it and grind for more customization options.
Thank you for bringing up Flair! I feel like no one talks about the stuff that used to be on Facebook. I have so much nostalgia for things like Food Fight, where you could " purchase" different things and throw them at your friend's pages, or the little rabbit widget you put on your page and deck out in armor. I had almost convinced myself I had made up all these different games and things you could add to your profile. I really feel like things started to go downhill when they got rid of them. :(
@@syrup_n_waffles DESPERATELY do I miss silly little pre-smart phone, pre-microtransaction widgets and virtual pets. Google used to, a thousand years ago, let you set a custom version of the Google search page (I think called My Google?) where kid me LOADED it with virtual pets and useless little toys.
Wow, I totally forgot about Flair until this comment :O
A little note on the ps5, you can customize the console as the white ps5 is the default but you can remove the plates for other colors. But regardless the ps5 is still a good example because the console itself does not have themes or anything unlike the ps4 and 3 which did.
I was happy to just get the red plate variant for my PS4. The bar is on the floor.
Having a different username on different platforms is actually good online hygiene
I LOVE UR GLASSES + thank U for showing me neocities. I've been looking at platforms like it (SpaceHey etc) and none of them have felt very cohesive to me but neocities seems to scratch my personalization itch. It's really sad to see modern social media strip people of who they want to express themselves as (on the platform), and favoring instead to value the numbers or content itself. There's a topic I've been experimenting with music lately of "context", how notes or phrases fall in line and not just what they are. Context is vital because any piece or phrase can be a good one, but it might not be the right one for what's around it. Since apps like Instagram don't have any way of contextualizing your content, your content becomes the context. Instead of expressing what you want to express I see many people expressing what fits the context of the other things they posted. It's really difficult for me to be on these apps and see my friends being displayed instead of expressing themselves.
Great video! I miss the days when you could change your TH-cam channel page to whatever you liked. 2013 was the year everything went flat...
OMG HI CARY HI HI HI
I started to have this realization after I played HypnoSpace Outlaw.
It put the entire experience and the vast difference in how the internet used to be in stark perspective for me.
As someone with a SpaceHey and a Neocities site, it feels so weird using social media with just... blank backgrounds and subscription services everywhere. Literally the only ones I can tolerate using post-spacehey-signup are youtube (ofc), pinterest and tumblr because memes and fandom spaces.
Also, a bonus I've noticed is that updating my neocities site and changing stuff about is kinda like studying for my software development course that's starting soon. It's nice being able to prepare in advance with a project I'm passionate about.
This is my first time watching your content and I love how you link to modern recreations of old sites! It’s nice to see niche communities still existing and bringing back the spirit of what’s lost
I miss 2011 TH-cam. One of my goals back then was to become a TH-cam partner just so I could have a channel banner lol. I also miss it when tumblr had more people on it. The website has so many great features, it stinks that it's been largely abandoned.
This came at a perfect time as I just recently have gotten obsessed with neocities. I also love customization, from stickers on my water bottle and laptop, constantly changing phone case, and growing pin/button collection on my backpack
Making a Neocities page has been a lot of fun and a great way to understanding html more. I really like having full control over everything that goes on my blog. Its honestly been really fun and it really inspires me to be more creative. I love when someone says they looked at my blog because I'm really proud of it and it makes the frustration and time I spent on it feel worth it. I just wish more people were on there!
Wonderful video! While I wasn’t old enough to have social media accounts during the ‘90s - ‘00s, I remember browsing the Internet a ton, and I remember it just felt so much more vibrant. Websites all felt so unique and distinct from one another. I hope that the push back in that direction really takes shape, I really miss that personal touch everything used to have!
Shock site video when???????
I think the Windows XP Install music is probably the MOST nostalgic song ever created.
As a new tumblr user, someone who made their account really recently (yes i exist >_
I've never heard of the DS themes and they look amazing!! I would kill for those to be on the switch- I want a splatoon one with new sound effects for when you press things, aaaaa i'd love it!
They've been adding customization for your profile picture on the switch (at a snail's pace, but hey), so I can be hopeful they'll add new themes.. eventually. You can currently only use platinum points to get pfp characters that weren't available by default, and also get them frames and backgrounds but that's it so far.
The themes part of the settings looks so empty without more colors, it's just light and dark mode! I'd love a pale green version or something if game-inspired themes are beyond them -0-
Just discovered your channel today, great vid btw! I wasn't in the internet during the 2000's and early 2010's but recently discovering how so much things are limited by corporations in the internet and computers in general is really just crazy. In the last months I discovered about the FLOSS community and it's amazing how much people are eager to customize and make the internet a place of art and communities and individualization, while corporations are literally addicting and tracking it's users for greed
again, great video :v
i definitely recommend spacehey! it reminds me of decorating my tumblr blog back in middle school and there’s a nice little community
I’ve been on SpaceHey since it’s launch, modern SpaceHey is a mess which only thrives off the name of a platform it will never live up to, I would recommend you leave it as soon as you can
steam is really the only "platform" that you can still customize pretty heavily
OMG THIS IS THE BEST. I love customisation sooo much especially on social media accounts. I love being able to change the colours of things, add fonts and gifs/pics which is why i’m still so drawn to things like tumblr. I literally hate minimalist designs so much and how everything is so bland now. I’ve been looking for a video covering this for ages ur my saviour 🙏 also u give me funkyfrogbait vibes! (huge compliment)
As an artist, I can say I really appreciate the toy house website for how customizable it can be! As well as the art fight website. While both are for mainly artists- especially those who mostly make original characters, many people still customize their accounts! It’s lots of fun to see, and I’ve actually been having a blast recently using BBCodes to customize my personal account with gifs, fonts, colors, and silly pngs💖💖💖
I’ve tbh never been online except for on those websites and TH-cam, so I didn’t realize what I was seeing used to be very common! Now I have more of an appreciation for it, and hope to see more customization on other sites and apps! It’s just very sweet and fun to see everyone putting their own personal touch to their accounts- you can rally tell how much effort and love they put into it!
Tumblr had kind of a revival the last few years, especially for teenagers. I'm fourteen, I've been on Tumblr for about a year and most (if not all) of my mutuals are ppl around my age. There's a lot of full-grown adults on there but there's also a little group of teenagers just having fun in a corner. Tumblr is probably the social media I use and enjoy the most, even if it's not popular anymore and most people my age don't know about its existence, actually I think that's what makes the experience better since it creates a sense of comunity most other social media platforms don't have.
Why did this conversation take 20 years to occur
Whatever Happened to Profile Customization?
capitalism.
Not a commie but you’re not wrong
Late stage capitalism gives you infinite options to choose: light gray, medium gray, dark gray or even beige.
discovering neocities a few months ago was my saving grace! been learning html ever since. it's so refreshing to have a personal hub different from all the monotone "linktrees" and to be able to make your website an art piece by itself.
I'm on a "old internet" deepdive right now and I really liked this video ^^ I didn't grow up with the boom of customizability on the web cause I was sorta busy being a baby in the 2000s but still being able to learn a coding program and make cool things is so fun :D and the fact that there are people that still craze that tackiness, not even purely for nostalgia because there are young people also getting into it these days too. i hope the chaos of the early internet always has a place on the web for freaks and geeks to hang out peacefully :3
i grew up with seeing all these customizable websites nd profiles only to have it ripped away the second i was old enough to actually participate 💔
Customization has been taken away from us, and capitalized on selling it to us for a solid bland limited scemes of colors. 🤢🤢🤮🤮🤮🤢🤮🤮🤮🤢🤮🤢🤮🤢🤮🤢🤮
Impossible to watch this ant not think about the incredible game "Hypnospace Outlaw". Makes me realize how much the game resembles actual internet history
This is Livejournal erasure lol. The customization options and layout designer community were quite crazy, and it's something Tumblr inherited a part of it after the Russians bought the website and most of us migrated from it to Tumblr if not to their clones (Dreamwidth tried, bless). There was also things like uploading multiple pfps (or icons, as they called them) and customized mood themes. Every blog post you could choose your mood from a list (which would show the image matching said mood) and the icon you wanted to show, making each post more unique and expressive. Also, you could choose icons when you posted a comment to someone else, which was a super fun feature! To match what you were saying with a certain pfp was so good that a lot of users dedicated themselves to make batches of 100 pixels x 100 pixels icons of their interests to share with the rest of Livejournal. There were icons/mood sets/layout communities, contests, etc., some even dedicated to specific fandoms. It was almost as important as a fanwork as fanart and fanfiction. I honestly really miss it. It was less cringe or "web design is my passion" than MySpace but more chaotic than Tumblr. I learned a lot of HTML/CSS and basic image edition (which is now a bit unusable because we moved on to HTML 5/CSS 3 and there's 0 use for those old 100x100 brushes) thanks to Livejournal.
That said, I also would make fansites back in the day (at first on Tripod because it had more storage space than Geocities, then on my own domain paying hosting) and spend a couple of years on Blogspot before moving to Livejournal which scratched the social interaction itch much better.
The editing in this one is freakin amazing, randy's being cool as always!!
What a wonderful channel to stumble upon. Great content!
I've recently been trying to recapture this early 2000s internet style that I was too young to fully enjoy, and I have to say neocities is by far the best way to do it, just scrolling through the main page I'm hit with a wave of nostalgia. I also recommend the 88x31 gif collection for some good y2k web building assets
Neocities sounds cool! I still play Neopets to this day, and I remember learning basic html to be able to customize pet pages and my shop back in the day!
"make the internet weird again" I feel this sentiment in my bones. It's a little sad how just... bland and corporatized the internet has become.
insta sub i love this and it just started. customisation is one of the reasons i used to make carrds a while back even tho they serve 0 purpose because of me not being famous or whatever and it not being an actual "social" site.
0:12 omg i wanna do this lol! i already have my so many sketchbooks covered in stickers.. but the problem is it's considered "cringe" now to do :( what should I do
Who cares, everyone keeps calling things cringe that people enjoy. DO IT! STICKERS ARE NOT CRINGE!
@URnightmares162 thank you :]
as a former "weird kid" in my middle school and high school days, I really miss logging into deviantart to customize the stamps on my profile or other fonts and such, and then later on migrating over to Tumblr where sometimes I would just spend an entire evening getting cozy and customizing my entire profile top to bottom with theme codes and such for hours.... good memories
Bring back old forums!!!! I just discovered your channel and absolutely love it. One of my hobbies is finding old fan-translation forums for early 2000's visual novels. It's so sad that the introduction to AI-translation and the death of forums has killed this niche community. I hope we can bring that type of energy back one day, personalization was the best part of the internet back then, bring back desktop accessories and social media platforms that don't make every page look the same!
i was introduced to neocities by youtuber named dimwit, i was so in love and felt a lot of nostalgia for old style internet even though i wasnt born or too young to experience it lol. ive been heavily considering leaving instagram and tiktok and posting everything on a neocities blog but i think im too lazy to do that for now lmao
All these reasons is why I decided to invest in my own website to use as a whole profile/writing area and customization, LOVE IT!
I’m 16, and for the most part I’ve grown up on the modern internet. But, I’m also a digital artist. Digital artists, like myself, don’t really *have* websites just for us (that are on the modern side, anyways) and so I recently began using sites like Toyhouse & Artfight. I started customizing my accounts with HTML, with stamps & gifs from deviantart/tumblr!!! It’s genuinely the most fun I’ve had on the internet. I would absolutely love to see old web styled customization come back in a more modernized, moderated way.
I’m definitely checking out the sites you’d listed (the ones still around, anyways 😭)
I think this is why I was so obsessed with Instagram stories for a couple years. I could add images, gifs, music, filters. It was a breath of fresh air and I'd always watch my own stuff until it disappeared after 24 hs
I cannot state enough how much I despise minimalism.
i feel like customization brings up engagement and makes using sites less of a viewer/creator experience, since people have their own input on their pages.
but if people have their own freedom how will coporations sell their personal data and shove advertisements in their face?
Been on the internet since we got AOL in the 90s and I would patiently wait 15 minutes for fan sites covered with photos to load (only to have someone pick up the phone and disconnect me). What I miss about the era is that customization and little Geocities pages encouraged people to build for the web themselves and learn some code. It’s still possible but web design has gotten so professionalized that a lot of “basic” sites require a much steeper learning curve to make if you want to code one. And the result of that is everything has been locked behind walled gardens of a few major tech companies so stumbling on new things and communities has become harder and fandom-driven. This has gone hand in hand with the appification of everything where device OS design increasingly gets in the way of users being able to explore settings, the file system, etc leading to a phenomenon where people have observed younger generations actually having less basic tech knowledge.
personalization social media needs to make a comeback!! i’m manifesting it!!
i left most social media just because i was getting tired of all the short videos like reels and tiktok and now im mostly on youtube and spacehey, things are chill ^_^
Yeah I definitely feel like the lack of creative diversity has lead to a lack of serotonin in my brain :3
This, so this. Thanks for highlighting the history and fading. I hope it returns in full force. I had a blog for years and stopped for some reason. I used to run portals even in the 90s to mid 2000s. Need to reboot that web presence!
FINALLY SOMEONE UNDERSTANDS.
But forreal. I made a MySpace just after it's heyday when Facebook was just starting to get big (I'm 26, got unrestricted access to my own desktop computer when I was 9 lol).
Even if it wasn't the most active, 90% of my time was spent on customization of my profile. I'd change it or add to it just for fun, and the rest of my time I spent browsing indie musicians and listening to songs that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to find again.
My early internet experiences as a precocious kid are ones I cherish tbh. My main haunts were fan forums, and I learned to make gifs just so I could have the profile I wanted lol.
When I finally gave in and got a Facebook, I was so disappointed. I remember for a long time using some kind of plug-in that gave me some customization, but of course I was the only one that could see it.
I was also very drawn to Tumblr and spent a lot of time customizing there as well. My original Tumblr blog is long gone, but I'm still a daily active user on there. That's... Mostly because I only go on tumblr and TH-cam now lmao (though I'll probably try out spacehey and make a neocities now lmao).
I think because I had formative experiences on the early web before everyone had a smartphone, but saw that immediately get demolished within a couple years has left me like some kind of wandering species with no internet home lmao. I am ill-adapted to the modern environment and yell at clouds from my dying platform lmao.
OH. AND THE DEVICES. I'm so tired of everything only coming in black, Grey, or white. For a while I was at a point that a phone coming in navy blue seemed like a miracle. I remember always thinking I would have the quirky girl laptop in a bright color with stickers like yours, but until I was 18 my parents wouldn't let me pick my own laptop, and by the time I could get my own they were all BORING
I really hope you're right and that we swing hard the other way. I want my pretty colors and customization back. You know the ps4 also had themes like the 3ds did? And the ps5 didn't? Outrage.
Can't believe the plot of DeBlob for the Wii was an omen afafsgsh
in regards to the macbook statement, i feel like something that other brands missed when moving to more greyscale colors was the element of self expression apple embraced, with stickers etc on the back of macbooks and the glowing apple, even to this day apple still embrace stickers on their laptops iirc, whereas i dont think ive really seen a whole lot of encouragement in regards to that from other brands.
A lot of companies seem way too caught up on this overly simple corporate look and its a shame that it has to pour into things that arent necessarily corporate in nature, social media doesnt need to look sleek and professional its there for you to express yourself
I've been complaining about this since 2011. When Myspace stopped allowing it youtube and everyone else wanted to follow.
A JIF????????????????????
you have sent me down a worrying rabbit hole with SpaceHey... thank you.
thanks for this video. i was a myspace addict. i have memories of going to my friends houses with computers to spend all my time on myspace. it was a wild time. love the little dose of nostalgia. i'm 33 now, and the sanitzed internet is all fake news
my god seeing youtube slowly devolve in terms of customization was so painful to watch.
it went from being able to give your own channel its own personality and theme
to being able to change its color
to only really being able to change banner and profile pic.
just why?
why throw away all of that?
the site is just so sterile and bland now.
Don't really use social media at all, but made a spacehey after watching cause why not. In my quest to get everbody's circulation to play into the bee movie script with my complete lack of HTML knowledge, I got 2 tiny copies of mandalore gaming's mystery of the droods review playing *very* slightly out of sync instead. It syncs back up if you mute and unmute the tab, but think I'm either gonna leave it as it, or start 1 copy 1 second ahead of the other, cause that seems really funny to me.
I’m doing this thing this month called art fight and you’re able to customize your profile! I customized mine and it was so much fun! I was able to put gifs, stickers, photos I got to do anything I wanted. I wish there was more things like this nowadays.
gif not jif. 😛
Here are my other theories:
1. If people spend too much time on customization they will spend less time on their feeds where the ads are which is how these social media companies make money
2. The simplicity of the interface and lack of customization makes it easier and less daunting for new users to sign up and gets them to start looking at their feeds (i.e. ads) quicker
3. I wouldn’t be surprised if these companies have done studies that show that too many choices may overwhelm the average person, decreasing new users
That all being said, i love customization and i think that platforms where customization was one of the huge selling points will only hurt themselves by removing those features.
I'll never forgive TH-cam for ruining my 2011 channel design
Selfhosting or bust
youtube was a hard hit, loved to make banners and backgrounds for everything, changing my cursor, adding full glass themes for w7 and changing the media player skin and other gadgets, it was a waste of time but, I think now it's just too impersonal and the reason why trends come and go so fast, like you can't really get into nothing at all unless your'e kinda radical geek.
Yeah, tbh it's so depressing all the "popular" apps are so bland looking. I wish there was more customizing... MySpace sounds so cool. I've recently been doing spacehey and it's pretty fun! But I wish I was on the real myspace in its prime Yk? I'm hoping that we bring back colorful fun customizable apps/websites!!
Jif 🤢
I had an old Tumblr account that I used to edit the HMTL (that's how I started my career in web developing) then a couple of years back, I've created a new account, since my old one was long gone, and I could not find a way to edit as I used to and so I ended up giving up. I saw a couple of customized blogs but thought that they were only retrofitted from older versions or whatever... Only now I found out that it's still possible to customize it!
#MAKEINTERNETWEIRDAGAIN
Tumblr still exists and you can customize your blog til your hearts content, but they make it awkward for anyone to actually access your blog as a webpage
Oh my goodness, I am so happy I’m not the only person talking about this!!! I love hearing people talk about this topic
When it comes to YT I miss linked video replies. Very early on it used to have them. Was similar to TikTok stitches, but better since all replies were linked under the video.
wow thank you for the neocities and spacehey recomendations, it's just what i was looking for. And big "hello world" from an old blogger from Argentina.
I’ll still never forgive everyone for jumping ship over to Facebook. I tried to fight it back in the day as hard as I could. I made a Facebook eventually, but never went on it. Eventually deleted it and have never made another. MySpace was SO much fun with its customization! I just can’t fathom why everyone wanted Facebook instead, it was so stupid to me. I wish we could bring it back to all its former glory. I html’d the sh-t out of my page for hours teaching myself how to code by reading the existing code from a layout that I downloaded and tweaking certain strings of text in it to see what worked and what didn’t. I loved it.
even though i dont use the services, i appreciate neocities and spacehey for bringing this type of culture back into the more modern eye
this is exactly why i love bandcamp. I don't know how its lasted this long, but you can make it look as maximalist and insane as you want or don't want to. this has resulted into times where you can run into crazy maximalist profiles with flashy backgrounds and bright colours a lot.
I miss profile customization so so SO much! I still look for how much you can do with a profile when I sign up for some new social media and I feel old for that lol. Because some younger people don't care as much, but that is because they cannot understand what they haven't seen. I was happy to hear about spacehey though and thinking about joining because of the nostalgia :)
I made a Tumblr in 2020 and I genuinely didn't know themes were a thing holy shit