thoughts about exploration on neocities

27 Sep, 2024

like many people, with announcement of cohost shutting down, i have decided that i simply do not want to go on to posting on a different social media website, and like many people i have decided to invest my time into my own personal website instead, with my own being hosted on neocities!

a big point of interest to me is how the neocities main website presents the opportunity to find and explore other users' neocities pages. it can be very very fun to explore everything the world of neocities has to offer, so much so that even before cohost's announcement i made regular trips through the newest sites section. seeing the buds of new projects just beginning to sprout, along with the duds of random junk websites generated by odd 3rd parties for frankly inscrutable reasons, is exciting and funny and odd and only rarely deeply disappointing! and along with exploring the newest for oddities, exploring the most popular sites can be very fun too, even if i occasionally find them a bit too polished for their own good. i do have a problem with neocities however, and that's how it makes it oddly difficult to find anything between the newest and the greatest it has to offer.

to quickly elaborate, if u do not know, neocities has several sorting methods for site discovery:

• Newest, which lists, as expected, the newest sites born into the neocities system
• Oldest, which does exactly the opposite
• Most Followed, self explanatory
• Views, which lists sites by most to fewest views, but it only goes 17 pages deep, not nearly enough to capture every single site, and i have a nagging suspicion that even with this limits its still occluding several sites from view
• Last Updated, to show off who has most recently done work to their site
• Random, which supposedly shows off a page of randomly selected pages, but given my own use of the feature, it seems to primarily pick from more popular pages, which is a bummer
• Special Sauce, which to my best guess, shows you similar websites to ones you've gone to, based on tags i assume? its not elaborated. it also seems to show off more popular pages.
• Tipping Enabled, i guess if you want to tip neocities users this is useful?

hopefully its clear to you that with these options, the cream of the crop keeps rising, the newest pages get a quick display before getting swept away, and the average user gets completely lost in the mix of it all. i find this to be incredibly sucks like shit! i wanna see the middle of the road sites, the ones that have found their footing but are maybe underpopulated! its a shame that only hope a user in the vast middle zone has is to hope they show up in the tag search. tags are little things you can label your site as and searching for them acts as a modifier to any of the above searches to yield more specific results, though again i suspect there's bias towards those who have already struck upon popularity.

i'm not sure why neocities seems to have set itself up in this way? those who choose to explore random pages, or decreasingly less viewed pages, are no doubt expecting some questionable content to be mixed in¹, so i think they should at least be allowed to see the full breadth of the neocities experience, without cherry picking. i don't know who it serves, seemingly nobody!

i hope it changes, i'm doubtful it will, i encourage you to try exploring for websites yourself, on neocities and out past its borders as well!