EASE.GG
Everything / Nothing
Everything / Nothing
The Website About Nothing
Twenty years ago I created Malignity.com which was a website about nothing. The year was 2000 (better known as Y2K), and I was still an underclassman in high school. Now, my so-called "website about nothing" was really just a collection of stuff that appealed to me at the time. And what appealed to the 16 year old me appears to be classic video game reviews, a mugshots gallery, having opinions on the news, the script to the film Kids, and links to my friend's sites.
My E/N site in 2000 - Malignity.com
You might be saying to yourself: "Wow, but that sounds like a personal website with a blog." But was blogging even a defined concept twenty years ago? The quick answer is no, it wasn't. And Malignity wasn't really a personal site either, it even had another author. I certainly didn't use it to promote my career because I didn't have any career to promote. And I wasn't selling anything - no ebook, no merch, no pop-up asking you to join my newsletter. I didn't even use my real name.
To my recollection, to have a web log (as it was called in those days) was to have simple diary entries. Malignity.com was a bit more random and dare I say, ambitious than that, even if it was still watered-down and derivative of its genre. And what genre was this? The Everything / Nothing (E/N) website.
Everything / Nothing (E/N)
Here is a description of an Everything / Nothing (E/N) site courtesy of Sawv.org:
The website's author covers a myriad of topics. It's not narrowly focused. The author writes about everything or at least everything that's important to the author. The site might contain something useful for anyone who visits. The content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world."
Here's one popular culture analogy to describe the concept: An E/N site was about nothing the way Seinfeld was a show about nothing. Any given article (or page) had a subject the way any Seinfeld episode had a plot. But as a whole, it can be seen to be about whatever.
Seinfeld was the E/N show
What made Seinfeld and great E/N sites compelling is how the personalities dealt with any given subject. How George Costanza deals with any situation is one reason to watch Seinfeld. One reason to read Something Awful was to get Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka's take on anything (like WWF Attitude for Dreamcast, for example). You didn't go to a site for specific content. You went for whatever content you were going to find.
Content
An alternative definition of E/N was Entertainment / News. This is a fairly apt way to categorize a lot of the content. Authors would reflect on popular culture at the speed of the 24 hour cable news cycle much in the way they do now in the age of social media. The difference today is this type of content is aggregated from millions of people ("users"), algorithmically sorted, owned by big media companies, and monetized through advertising. But more on that later.
An irony of these websites is that while you could create anything and everything, it ended up pretty formulaic. My site certainly followed some kind of "E/N format", and this was something I even lamented back then. Twenty years later I will just chalk this up to human nature. Let's face it, people emulate other people. The web moved fast even back in 2000, and things do not stay original for very long.
Another truth of human nature is that sex and gore get people to click on your links. The Everything / Nothing world had a "shock jock" in Jay Stile. The Stile Project was a site full of porn, gore, and fake suicide attempts. It was also the most visited E/N site, and one of the more world's popular websites at the time. It even won a Webby award. Jay was certainly reflecting the darker sides that already existed on the web, but had also developed his own voice to go along with it. Two things then happened rapidly: he spawned copycats, and he optimized his content for making ad-click cash. You can find a forum post about someone talking to Joe Rogan (who he shared web hosting with) at a comedy show in 2002 about how Stile made $60K a month. Bizarre, but I totally believe it.
The best writers gave their site content a lot of personality but what really sets this era apart was how hand-crafted everything was from a more technical standpoint. You had custom everything. You want a custom form? You coded it yourself. Many sites had pages and features not seen anywhere else. As an effect, you would actually want to go each website by URL to interact with it and see what was new. Undoubtedly, many web development careers were spawned from. The key to unlocking the most creativity was in scripting.
Discovery
Imagine a World Wide Web before Google. Really, you can do it. I was there. Even people who spent all night browsing the internet didn't use Google at this time. Also imagine the web without any social media. People were just leaving AOL, and no walled gardens had been yet created on the web to take its place.
In the E/N world, the primary way of discovering more of these websites was through links from the sites you were already visiting. A link and/or quick news plug from somewhere popular could net you thousands of new visitors. I would email the webmasters of more popular sites and ask for them to link my site. Some did, and some would dismiss as a beggar.
You Will Believe What Happened Next
Back in one of my posts from 2000 I answered 'no' to the question of whether E/N sites were dead. But I left my own site behind completely by 2002, and as far as I can tell the trend was definitely a goner by the middle of the decade.
Even during the height of the trend, many sites would just vanish without notice. Various reasons included suspended web hosting, domain registrations expiring, or even sites getting hacked and deleted. Not to mention, the creators were often teenagers. A creator obtaining their driver's license could often be enough to kill a site off. Some of these pages I linked from my site don't even seem to show up on Archive.
It was amateur hour, but that was part of the appeal. This was a weird blip in time. After the dot-com crash, but before the next wave of venture-backed internet ("Web 2.0"). The web at this moment was truly more decentralized, long before the usage of that word became synonymous with nauseating marketing pitches for magical Internet money. Without a doubt, the experience gained from building one of these sites helped spawn the careers of many web developers, writers, and media people. The guy who actually could write an article on Malignity got paid eventually to write articles. People have been paying to make websites for them for quite some time. I even replaced Google once.
While many sites vanished without even a trace, not every E/N site has even died off fully. Something Awful became more known for its forum. One of its forum members would go on to create a far more infamous board. Hear Ye! eventually adopted WordPress and became a full-fledged personal blog. And the Stile Project became more or less just a network of porn sites that sold in 2010.
What really lives on today is the "platforms" that proceeded these websites - stuff like Digg, Fark, LiveJournal, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, or Twitch.
To me, there are a couple things that make me sad about this. First is the massive content aggregation that takes place. The work of millions of people now is monopolized by Facebook, YouTube, or Reddit. These businesses get ad money, and you get an integer value in a database - upvotes, karma, or whatever. Second is the cookie cutter content creation tools the "users" are afforded. Casual users of the web no longer get introduced to HTML, CSS, or scripting. Think about it: you can't even italicize words in your tweets or Facebook posts.
Epilogue
I never really intended to take such a long trip down memory lane. However, once I got traveling down this path I realized there isn't much content out there about this little era. It appears given twenty years even a phenomenon that existed solely on the internet can almost totally disappear from the internet. I guess that is a goal I have for EASE.GG: invoke a bit more of that original spirit. To think a little more outside of the input box.