Whatever Happened to Profile Customization?
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- Опубликовано: 3 июл 2024
- Have you noticed that the internet has gotten a lot more bland and boring over the last decade or so? What's up with that?
Intro: 00:00-00:54
GeoCities: 00:55-04:02
MySpace: 04:03-09:02
Tumblr: 09:03-13:01
Honourable Mentions: 13:02-16:21
Conclusion: 16:22-18:15
Follow me on social media! randymoon.carrd.co/
Songs used:
2008 Toyota Corolla - 2003 Toyota Corolla
nightvision (overture) - esc 不在
Velkommen (Windows XP Welcome Music) - Stan LePard
Megalovania - Toby Fox
Wii U Mii Maker Theme
2010 Toyota Corolla - 2003 Toyota Corolla 
Развлечения
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
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.
youtube's loss of customization is something that will always make me sad =( now it really only extends to like... banners and thats rly it
woah its the roblox dude
How do you only have 8 likes?
same
Me too, Dude. Me too.
I'm remember their header "You're a unique snowflake" when making the announcement.
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.
@@FuneralPasta 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
The reason the Internet Archive is so slow to load sometimes isn't the sheer amount of gifs/data on a page (these pages _did_ have to load in the dial-up days and storage was generally super limited), it's because they're archived on magnetic tapes that have to be retrieved and loaded from! A lil robot grabs the tape with the data for your particular request and loads all the data from the tape before putting it back :3
just had a hard flashback to the little videotron automated booth at the corner three blocks east of me with the robot arm pulling VHS tapes out for me from the library racks and giving it to me.
oh my god i love them :D
Pretty sure they built a petabyte server just for the Internet archive, as shifty as it is I’m grateful IA even has that much shit
I hope both sides of your pillow are cold and that you will eat the most delicious dish ever in the next few days
I miss the option to add music to your profile. I was so obssesed with that. After I decided on the song that will be on my profile, I enter my profile and read through the "About Me" section, looked at my friends and images while the music was playing, and thinking I was someone else checking on my profile, hahaha.
I bet I was not the only one.
I miss it sm :[ I get that in some cases it poses a copyright issue but it isn't like modern Spotify embeds aren't a thing! Or just compose your own music, I've seen two websites that are still up do that, it was very cool!
Something about your own website having its own theme song just hits different, it makes it feel more immersive, like those cool audio visual rooms in museums. My dumb little carrd feels so empty without bg music
Instagram recently added this feature and i was so happy about it lol
2007 mood 🥲
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.
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!
Honestly, I think a major reason old heavily-customized profiles have declined in popularity is because most people now primarily use their phones to browse the web, not their PCs anymore. While a lot of people still use their desktop for their internet browsing, social media companies need to optimize the experience for all users, which unfortunately resulted in rather same-y profiles. Those heavily accessorized profiles often are very clunky and awkward to navigate on a mobile device. There's a reason why tumblr mobile opens up to the mini-profile, and not the fully decked out blog!
And sometimes phone internet in some countries are slower than Wi-Fi, which makes website slower and take longer to load
@@Kalitayy this too! so much to consider.
So, it's about efficiency and convenience, the need to cater to as wide as an audience as possible in order for the service/product to maximize revenue.
I agree! I took a web development class and they also explained this as an accessibility issue as bright clashing colors do inpact readability and screen readers may have trouble reading more eccentric fonts
Honestly, smartphones have been the bane of the internet.
They're just not suited to general internet usage. Their format fundamentally is only suited to hyper-simplistic designs and limited experiences.
For countries where people take pride in their individuality (especially the USA), I'm surprised the most popular social media tries to limit the amount of customization to their profiles nowadays. It's cool to see neocities having a cult following and hopefully we can get more websites like those in the future.
America takes pride in the illusion of individuality, you’ll be cast out if you are actually unique. Same with Canada.
@@ColdBaltBlue yes, though it depends on the context.
America celebrates conforming selfishness not individualism.
USA likes individuality if its the vibes you would get at a walmart or target, if its not what is in a luxury or outlet mall they don't want you.
I'd argue the USA very much does not value individuality, and never has. The USA oscillates between periods of mass-conformism and mildly competitive conformism.
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 Wibly 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
I've been hitting a point lately where I miss the old more chaotic website themes, especially as an artist who feels so disappointing with the most bland website themes when making a website for my art portfolio. I took an art business course (portfolio website was the final) and most of the time was being told not put so many things that make me stand out as an artist. I ended up with a bland af portfolio site I won't feel comfortable with telling anyone about
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!
Y'all. Make your own websites. It's pretty much the solution to this problem we have to deal with. Get a neocities account and make yourself a blog or whatever the hell you want. Go online and find forums or literally create your own forum (you can LITERALLY DO THAT).
There's this frustration that a lot of us feel due to losing their online freedom. And I feel like most people in a general sense, don't want to go and do the work needed to achieve it due to the convenience of social media sites. All it takes is a little effort, especially when there's so many free resources to learn from.
The problem isn't that you can't do that. The problem is that there's no point in having a website if nobody is going to visit it, starting a forum if nobody is going to use it, etc.
There are forums that still exist. Their last post was five years ago.
@@seigeengine Gonna be honest, that's just an excuse. There are tons of blogs, portfolios, and other websites online that are currently running and active right now. Learning how to get people to visit is on you as an individual just like any other website. Hell the whole point of neocities is to be a social place where people can visit your site.
People want to winge about how social media is toxic or people not being able to be free online/being at the whim of these services and businesses. Then when you actually got to do the work for it, people try to find a reason not to do it. Back in the day, people made websites just to create them and express themselves and they found ways to get people to find them if they desired that. Some of the sites were very well designed, some weren't, but the point was creating your own space in the infinite World of the internet.
As for forums, though it is definitely a lesser used method of online social spaces. That doesn't mean that there aren't any that are currently running right now with their own communities chilling out. I found one literally a couple of days ago that is incredibly active and just very tight-knit. All depends on where you look.
@@ArtsyFoxo No, it's the core fucking concern.
Nobody goes to random neocities pages. It's a fundamental shift in how people interacted with the internet. Personal websites are basically relics. Nobody goes to them. You either put your content on the major platforms or nobody pays attention to you.
A perfect example of this in action is how every webcomic used to have it's own website. Now they're all in the same couple of places. That wasn't because the creators got lazy, or it was cheaper. It's because people stopped going to those individual websites, and there was no inflow of new viewers because nobody goes to individual websites for webcomics anymore.
You can posture about how that's your fault, but the reality is that the ecosystem has shifted, and if you want to go it on your own, you're fighting an uphill battle to just not completely fail, never mind achieve meaningful success. Even old services like geocities and myspace kind of demonstrate this. They were already demonstrating a drive towards centralization.
Forums are a bit of a funky case, because they evolved rather than went away. What is Reddit, really, other than a variant of forum? Discord has forumish characteristics as well as being chat rooms. The traditional concept of a forum, however, is basically done. There are still niches where forums are used, but they're very much niches. Anyone trying to tell you that kind of forum isn't dead is conning you.
@@ArtsyFoxo that's just bitview
what's the link to your website and/or forum?
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
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.
I've been complaining about this since 2011. When Myspace stopped allowing it youtube and everyone else wanted to follow.
I really like what sheezy is doing where you can customize your profile but you also have the option to disable someone’s theme in case of accessibility and whatnot
its so tragic tumblr is leaning rly hard into opening blogs only on dashboard as opposed to the actual blog page...ntm forcing ppl to use only "https" in your code p much made most themes unusable :') i missed the days of ppl changing their themes all the time and telling ppl to check it out. it was truly an art form
"queer person talks too much about 2000-2005 websites" is my favorite subgenre of youtube video :)
Same community would be bullied off websites in the early 2000s
@@reesetubeNot necessarily. There have been safe corners on the internet for queer people since the Usenet days
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.
The state of the internet makes me depressed
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)!
in 2006 i spent my days in school skipping class in the back of the multi media room learning HTML only for facebook to dominate two years later and turned HTML into a freaking joke.
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 had a Tripod site... that was kinda like Geo Cities. lol... also, I am 34 so you know damn well I was ALL ABOUT MySpace customization. I still can't believe they had us 16 year olds using basic HTML on these profiles. lol I remember being annoyed that everyone was jumping over to Facebook because of the lack of customization options.
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.
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.
Fantastic video, I weep for old internet customization 😭 Especially here on RUclips, 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.
i have every NEW site in this video exept a neocities, bc idk what to put on a website other then a portfolio. my tumblr is still decked out like a splatoon 2 lobby, my spacehey is pastel for now, and my 3ds is modded to swap between 10 custom themes. my phone case is clear so i can decorate inserts to put into the case, and my water bottle of choice is decked in stickers i got as extras for buying from geek shops. my keyboard has been customized with the fastest keyswitches and dark purplest kawaii keycaps.
having to be stuck with a header and banner for 80% of websites is the bane of my existence, and does not help me show off all the things im into in one area! so having to learn to graphic design, JUST so i could do that in the limited space we are given...sucks? luckily photopea, pixlr, and krita exist bc otherwise i would be stuck.
I've been using spacehey as one of my main forms of social media for about 9 months now and while it definitely does have its own issues the amount of customization and creativity people show on it is incredibly refreshing! I've made lots of great friends on it and it feels like a lot of people my age (teens and young adults) are starting to get fed up with the simplistic and boring corporate nature of the modern internet.
Why not just don’t latch to social media at all or Atleast use something decent like cohost
SpaceHey is an unmoderated mess, a PHP experiment kept up for too long
The entire community which isn’t just raiders are tumblrinas
It’s a bad website and the only reason people still use it is because it thrives off the name of MySpace which it barely resembles
spacehey is pretty much only good for the customization lmao. the people there are fuckin demented
I liked being able to customise my old tumblr and MySpace page, I loved how it could auto play songs I’d written when people would click on my page and then the play count would go up and I’d feel like I was succeeding as a musician.
Great video
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
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
I LOVE NEOCITIES AND SPACEHEY!!!
I miss 2011 RUclips. One of my goals back then was to become a RUclips 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.
Shock site video when???????
The keychains and buttons girl 😂
The editing in this one is freakin amazing, randy's being cool as always!!
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.
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
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
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 RUclips 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
I would love it if youtube brought back customization.
shock site video needed, more randy content is always amazing
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
I love this topic!
I've often been thinking about the "old internet" recently and just mulling over what exactly it was that made it so different, and more engaging than today. having been too young and missing out on geocities (I think my family only ever got internet around the middle of what would be the myspace era) i'm now eager to go check it out on the archives and the tip of gifcities you gave made it seem so much less intimidating to do so.
thanks for talking about it!
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!
good video essay, paced concisely, very focused, with a sound conclusion that is explained clearly. doesn't fall into a lot of modern video essays' failures
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
you have sent me down a worrying rabbit hole with SpaceHey... thank you.
yessirkski a randy moon video
This was a awesome video
i am SAT for new randy moon upload
Im more new to this whole thing but I’ve LOVED customization and fashion,being edit to customize your profile was right up my alley. I only found the customize tumblr theme like a month ago but oh boy have I spent many afternoons trying to make themes only to reload onto the main page and find that my work was for nothing .Also I feel like you should’ve mentioned carrd but oh well
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 :]
this was such a good video :3
One of the big reasons of moving away from customization is branding. If site has static design every screenshot will be the same. When you see instagram you know it instantly. When you see facebook, you know it instantly. When you see random ass tumblr blog with glittering gifs and navigation menu all over the place, you can't tell it's tumblr.
Corpos want infinite growth and branding is one of the ways to sustain said growth.
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 💔
Really good video
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
YESSSS RANDY MOON POSTED
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
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 😭)
instant sub for pronouncing gif correctly
great video also i love your hair
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
Dope vid
Underrated topic.
Selfhosting or bust
Everskies feels very myspace-y in its customizability too which I love
You should have used the Homestuck version of Megalovania. Would have been more fitting for the time frame.
awesome video !!! ^__^
We just cant go back from here...
vids poppin off
I don't think many people *actually* liked minimalism on websites. most of the transition to minimalism was to do with SVG and vector art taking hold, since it would scale to any display seamlessly and quickly. people prefer the look of maximalism and frutiger aero more however.
Now I want a way to scroll the posts i missed on tumblr where you start looking at the custom blog page of the latest follower's blog, infiniscrolling all the posts from them you haven't seen until you hit the point where it should be posts you have seen already, at which point their whole blog collapses upwards and the next blog in the queue is pulled up from the bottom of the frame. Maybe with their icons on a navbar on the left side for quick navigation between blogs. Really put the custom blogs front and center to the browsing experience.
Second, love your videos!❤
I loved customizing my tumblr, I had (still don't) have coding knowledge so it was fun to use the pre-made themes and customize those
honorable mention for gaia online (2003-present) for their myspace profile customization/layouts back in its hayday as well though a lot of them broke around the 2010s
Whatever Happened to Profile Customization?
capitalism.
Not a commie but you’re not wrong
littleppbigheart is sending meeee bro what i didnt expect that refrence
The thing is that advertisement used to be way more rampant in the 2000s, but now its data collection that the corporations are going for. Also the internet has not changed but the culture of the internet is whats changed.
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.
RIGHT!??! Social media sucks SO MUCH nowadays. I hate it.
now you got me all riled up for the nth time about not being able to have a hatsune miku theme on my switch
my minecraft channel got partnered back in 2013, and my favorite part was how you could customize the channel page with a banner
One of the reasons I stuck with Reaper for doing music production is that you can customize literally everything. EVERYTHING!!! It feels like my cozy little workspace now instead of something someone else made for me. Same thing with the digital world in general - I liked it better when things looked like an actual hooman bean had something to do with it instead of everything being a copy of a copy...
2003 Toyota corolla mentioned ❤🔥❤🔥
yeah!
I started making my NeoCities last year and it's been so much fun! I'm gonna make a SpaceHey too cuz why not?
Looking at you holding the mic like that for so long gave me tendinitis but awesome vid
I tried watching this and couldn’t even get passed the first 16 seconds
Your personality is similar to lain and internet nerd girls which I love ngl, I wish you luck and success and feel so much relatable
You're staring into my soul.
Honestly I love that fedi instances based on akkoma or sharkey let you change the background of your profile page. honestly this should be considered the bare minimum. let me have a PNG set as the background.
I miss how customizable old windows computers used to be
now I can just change the color... Hooray...
I grew up with geocities, angelfire, and MySpace. I've been using the internet since 1994. Windows 95 and AOL. What I miss must about the old internet was the uniqueness of it all. And the wild wild west feel of it. Back then things were not monitored like they are now. It was a different time.
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.