who are the people in your neighbourhood?

We enjoyed indulging a bit in Quartz’ latest obsession—nostalgia for the early internet before the rise of social media as distilled through GeoCities (previously)—later to be acquired by Yahoo!—as the dominate platform for user-generated content and interaction. We, like the article, had fun speculating on the dilettante nature of the early internet as a cul-de-sac for the weird and lament that loss—as for niche eBay—and wonder how it might have been without unnamed monoliths with too many adherents. How would our on-line landscape look today had secondary web generations never had arisen? Admittedly the decentralised web looks pretty raw and idiosyncratic and perhaps isolated but I still feel those labours of love are preferable to the atrocious and unreadable magazine that you and everyone you know rushes to print everyday.