Gripes with the Neocities community

The Neocities community is, for the most part, quite enjoyable to be in. However, there are various things about it that can be quite annoying.

No names will be mentioned in this post, mostly because the cause of these issues are typically really young (think 12-16) and/or simply new to this online niche. Besides, I don't want anyone harassed over them being annoying or cringe or whatever...

1. Feed spammers and microbloggers

The Neocities feed is a neat little feature in theory. You can view a site's daily updates and comment on each update or on the profile itself, making it a bit of an hybrid of an Neocities-exclusive RSS feed and a guestbook.

Sadly, it often gets misused. This has a lot to do with people who use the feed to share their thoughts or talk to other people an excessive amount. Sure, a small update about your life you're excited about or a small joke post every once in a while is totally fine. It's when you do it everyday, multiple times a day, to say shit that no one on Earth cares about that it starts getting a little bit excessive.

It gets even worse when people start having full-blown conversations in the replies:

I mean... c'mon. This is not private. Have these mindless conversations on Discord or something. Stop spamming your followers' feeds with this nonsense.

2. Social media mindset

This issue is loosely related to the previous one, mostly because most spammers overflow the feed with microblogging (a staple in social media).

However, it goes much, much further than that. We're talking users calling out and/or dogpilling others, be it on the feed or on their websites themselves. Admittedly I've been guilty of this before, so I can kind of understand the sentiment- the social media mindset is very hard to get rid of.

That being said, Neocities is a free webhost. This means anyone with any opinion can have a website. Hell, I've seen neonazis on Neocities, and while I vehemently disagree with their mindset I can't force them out of a platform that in itself celebrates freedom of expression. It's just the reality of freedom of speech: there's good and bad to come from it.

3. People who only care about layouts

This particular gripe brings my piss to a boil. So, a webmaster spends a fuckton of time writing articles, reviews, whatever for their site... and you only care about how pretty the layout looks? I mean, really?

I've seen people who are (or at least claim to be) very much against certain opinions, from TERFs to proshippers, follow people who are openly aligned with those ideas because they only care about how pretty their site looks. Regardless of your stance on anything at all, don't you think this is a little bit silly?

Not only that, you also get the people who have a great-looking site... with absolutely nothing of value to be found in it. You'll get an about page and maybe a collection of graphics, and that's about it.

4. Default sadgrl layout

Picture this: you're casually browsing new websites, and you find this:

Now, my issue with this is not the actual site. Sure, they're usually very boring and quickly get abandoned, but my issue lies with the layout builder itself.

So, here's the thing... I have no personal issues with sadgrl or its webmaster, but the layout builder, although impressive in its execution, was not a good idea for the Neocities community.

My reasoning is simple: the layout builder develops code that is very hard to understand for beginners. In other words, it's less educative than it aims to be and more of a Carrd (blech) knockoff.

Say what you will about templates, at least most of them encourage customization. Not only that, the creator of said template can add comments to teach users on how something works. The same can't be said about the layout builder.