GeoCities
The internet's first neighborhood. Condemned.
CAUSE OF DEATH: Yahoo bought it for $3.57 billion and bulldozed it ten years later.
Animated GIFs, Visitor Counters, Regret
67% hot ¡ 3 votes
GeoCities gave everyone a free homepage and zero supervision. By 1999 it was the third most visited site on the web, and it had just lost $8 million in a quarter. In 1998 it tried stamping a watermark on users' pages and they threatened to leave. Yahoo looked at all of that and paid $3.57 billion in stock. The 38 million-plus pages it hosted were a monument to what people build when nobody stops them. Yahoo shut the U.S. service on October 26, 2009. Volunteers saved about 900 gigabytes of it as a torrent. Japan kept its version alive until 2019. Every tasteful website since has been an apology.