i went through this collection of buttons and thought, what if i just visited sites based solely on how aesthetically appealing i found their buttons? if i were to make a button collection that i thought looked nice, how many of the sites would i actually like?
as-is, my button wall also serves as a pseudo-bookmarks list for sites i think are neat and want to come back to; as such, it is not particularly aesthetically appealing or cohesive.
i picked out 312 buttons that i found really appealing. out of over 6000! it seems i'm picky. there were a handful more that i liked that were sites i already have bookmarked/linked, to be fair, but still.
today i looked at 100 sites, a nice round number. the result:
- 33 mostly empty
- 23 sites i liked and will add to my buttonwall
- 22 404/deleted
- 16 had plenty to look at, but it was not relevant to my interests whatsoever
- the remaining 6: 2 were run by terfs, 1 was possibly the wrong site, 1 i fit their dni, 1 was a kinda-small graphics collection, & 1 i wasn't sure what it even was
not surprising! any neocities browsing session is going to turn up a whole lot of pages that are either just an index or just an index + an about page. i think there's a lot of intersecting factors involved in that.
so far at least, judging a book by its cover is not especially effective in finding websites i enjoy. also not surprising. i am glad that i found some new sites to enjoy, and i'm sure there will be some more as i go through the rest of the bunch over time. there's a bit more stuff i like than i expected, to be honest!
there's also way fewer terfs than i expected; i wonder if i'll find them later on. there's a fairly sizeable terf subculture on neocities (or at least there was at some point).
browsing neocities is always interesting, even when it's a lot of broken links and empty sites and stuff that's not rtmi. i like getting a feel for the subculture, and i think abandoned & unfinished material is a really important part of that. absence is information.
three of the sites i liked were ones i thought i already had links to on my page, but it turns out i didn't! dokodemo, ditto dan, and entrance or exit.
