Oh, she's blasting at me. Yes. Maybe it's being recorded. I know. Okay.

Formally, StepChange.

of validation for usernames. So you could create the same username. It would wipe out the existing username and create a new site on top of it.

Okay. Still can hear me? Okay. Cool. I'm a try to share the screen here because it's gonna be a lot funner if I can. Select window or screen. Let's see. I gotta figure out which one to share. This perfect. Can everybody see that? Okay. Can everyone see that? Yes? No? Oh my god. It just says, how has started screen sharing, but it has not completed screen sharing. Yeah. We see a Okay. Try it.

It's look like the Let me let me try using the same browser and see if that works. Window. Let's see. Except for continually reminder, I wanna use Linux, so that stuff happens all the time. Okay. Share screen. Oh, it doesn't even show the window. Let's just try this one. Damn. This this. How about that? That works? Anyone? Yep. Perfect. Perfect. Oh, good. Good. Okay. Cool. Zip same browser, apparently, is the trick there. Yeah. This was the this was the Web one o conference. It was pretty fun. I kinda made it like a you know, I was kinda just, like, nineties themed and stuff, and then, like, we just had a bunch of people hanging out at what was it? It was it was at the MIT Media Lab, I think, And it was a bunch of cool. This demo is really fun. Who was it? It was Bob was it the the VisiCalc guy showed up. Right? It was Bob Yeah. Clark's Clarkson Clarkson?

He was very fun. I don't see him here. There is Bob Frankston. That's it. Bob Bob Frankston. That was the guy, and I loved it. He we showed up with light roast coffee, which was kinda like the trendy thing in Portland at the time, and he was so mad that I didn't show up with French roast. He was just like, you know, I have to have dark roast. This stuff's terrible. And I

Yeah. He's cool. Okay. So lots of good history with him. So I I hi. I'm Kyle Drake. I I run The US studies as it was discussed earlier. Thanks for the intro. The let's see here. Disclaimers quick disclaimers. I'm not an academic. Uh-oh. It's playing music. Hope you didn't hear that. Sorry. A lot of the Neo study sites play music, so I have to, like, mute it all the time. I'm not an academic. I'm not really an expert on anything. Actually, some of the talks at MediGov, I was kinda like, oh, shit. I should watch that. Maybe I should learn I could learn something. You know? I'm not good at talks either. And, frankly, it's been, like, four or five years since I've done a talk. I just since COVID, I just haven't really put out any talks at conferences or anything. So, you know, I guess the way to to take this is, like, this is a slice of life here. Like, I run a platform. And, you know, it it you know, this is just sort of, like, my experience running a practical online community that, like, that you can kind of bounce, you know, you know, treat it like that. You know? Like, it's it's not it does not come from an academic perspective. It comes from, like, someone that's, like, in the you know, doing the work, basically, and not necessarily an expert on this topic. And I don't get to have a moderation board with, like, you know, people that do full time moderation. I am in charge of moderation on NeoCities. And so, I you know, it's kind of just, like, an arbitrary thing a lot of the time, and I I'll get into that. But, yeah, NeoCities, basically, they spend you know, if you remember GeoCities, it was it's kinda like just another GeoCities, honestly. I just decided I wanted to make another one. And after looking at some old websites from the nineties and being like, man, that was fun when people use the Internet that way, maybe we should bring that back. And, so that's kinda what we I did is, like, start on a whim here. This is one of the sites here that was playing the music. This is one of my favorite sites that, I don't know, Melon King site. I I like when you click on the links here. Let's see. It has an elevator now that goes to the elevator animation happens, and it, like, spits out the new floor of the site you're on or whatever. One of my favorite things about this site actually is that it closes oh, this one's nuts. It's got it's like squirrel. Oh, it moves based on no. It's actually just I thought it was the mouse that was making it move back and forth. But, anyway, this this site my favorite thing about the site is it closes on Mondays. So if you try to go on Monday, it just puts up the screen that just says, we're closed today. Come back tomorrow. And I thought that was pretty pretty entertaining, but I kinda just peppered random new site to do this because I didn't want it to be super boring. This was the first, you know, I I kind of was just and I I was actually working on Shielding with Amber, and it was kinda after that. And I'm like, oh, what do I do next with my life? You know? And so I I was I kinda just decided, oh, I'm just gonna try to make another another Chiyo city and, like, web hosting service for, like, personal website context. And I kinda came up with, one month later, launched this thing. This is what NeoSays used to look like. It's just a terrible bootstrap theme, basically. And, you know, I launched it that way and started to get sites and stuff and kinda just went from there. I open sourced it right away. Actually, the the front end for NeoSudies is completely open source. You can actually go to it and, just see everything I'm doing with the the the at least the sort of web, you know, neoss.org part of, you know, like, the the front page site or whatever that does all the, like, main code stuff. The back end is not open source as in, like, the CDN, and main reason for that is just I don't know. It's just I don't there's no real value in that, honestly, and it's you know, there's stuff in there that I I kind of there's, like, throttle limits and stuff like that. It'd be kinda hard to make that open source because people attackers could potentially use it for nefarious things. But, yeah, we, you know, we did there was a redesign of the site, and now it kinda looks like this. And this was actually done I don't know. It's a you know, the NeoSpace is, like, eleven years old now. And so this is this was the site as of, like, I wanna say, like, nine years ago or something like that, and it's kind of maintained itself pretty well. I haven't had to really, like, do a big redesign or anything, just because it it's a pretty timeless design overall, and it kinda just does most of the stuff that I wanna do with it. So you know? And, you know, people hate redesigns anyways. Like, once they get comfortable with an interface, they don't really wanna change it that much. And so, you know, it's just kinda just what we stuck with. And also just because, oh my god, it takes forever to do redesigns on pages. One of the big differences with our platform is it makes it very easy to explore and, like, discover new stuff. So, like, there's actually just you can go to the new station. There's just it take scroll through the sites, and these are all actually just screenshots that are taken of all of the sites. And I think, honestly, that is the main innovation of NeoCities is just that, like, it we we we try very hard to make sites browsable and sort of visual to inspect you know, like, have visual inspection of the sites before you actually go to them. And so I've actually taken this and brought it to the GeoCities world too as in the GeoCities archive world. If you go to GeoCities let's stay here. GeoCities. This is also a project I did a while back that's essentially a gallery of all of the GeoCities sites. You can actually go through and click on one. Oh, yeah. Let's do the golf one. Why not? I'm into golf. And you can kind of actually see a screenshot of all of the stuff on here before you actually click on any of it. And we were the first Geocities archive to actually do that. And, yeah, it's before that, it would just be directories of numbers. Right? Because, like, Augusta, Fairway, 1021. Right? They had a sort of suburban architecture that that sort of made it so that you you wouldn't really know what was at the number. And so having a visual screenshot really just, like, gives you that ability to look at stuff. And and that's I've actually recently implemented that so that if you share near to these links, it actually shows the screenshots too if they didn't embed any, OpenGraph metadata. And, that's a that, you know, that's I think that's, like, a really important thing that, like, a lot of people kinda miss when they do, like, web hosting platforms. It's like, if you can't actually, like, go through and quickly look at stuff, it's a lot harder to, you know, do it or whatever. The anyway, so that's a big deal. And then I also added some kind of social networking components to that. It's sort of weird to say it that way. I mean, it's just kinda, like, common and stuff. It's a lot of the stuff that you would expect to see on, like, you know, like guest books or web rings or stuff like that. Decided to put that functionality on the front site and not necessarily on the back end sites. And the reason for that is because websites last forever. And so if you don't, you know, depend on back end services, the web pages will still load fine, and they'll work correctly. And so it it's actually separating that sort of programming functionality from, like, the actual display of the pages means that they will last a lot longer. So if NeoCities goes kaput for some reason, the web pages that are hosted on it will still work almost perfectly. And, you've seen you know, if you there's some examples of this. Let's see here. Sean. This is a web page that's like this is a web page that I love showing people. It's probably 30 years old or something. Like, it's eighty, ninety years old or so not 90 years old. 20 years old or so. It's a long it's old. And, actually, all of it kind of, you know, it's not perfect, but you it's all kind of oh, yeah. It's a web page about hostess ads in comic books from, like, the seventies or whatever. They used to, like, have, like, yeah, Aquaman, like, you know, fighting the the serpents to steal like, they're trying to steal Twinkies or whatever. And it's all very funny. And, but if you look at the source code for this, it's all, like, table layout and stuff. I don't know if you remember before CSS, you had to use tables to, like, do layout and, design. And, the thing is is it still works. You know? Like, this is this is, you know, twenty five years old, and it still loads in a new browser. And if you look at, like, the first web page ever made, it still kinda works in a new browser. So if if you're careful, you can makes you can set it up so that you can design sites that last a very long time, in you know, for technology standards, you know, where, like, languages just kind of go every five years. There's a new language and stuff, but the stuff tends to stick around. We don't have a WYSIWYG editor. It actually is just text editing completely. And so the yeah. It's just I mean, that's just always how it's been. It's like an empty canvas or whatever, and you gotta show up like Bob Ross and paint something. And there's a lot of reasons for that. I mean, a lot of it is just, like, I don't know how to make the WYSIWYG editor, like, translate to decent HTML, you know, like, in terms of, like, you can edit it and use the WYSIWYG editor. And, I've also, like actually, it's funny. I know people that have, like, had websites hosted on, like, Wix and stuff, and they they'll change the design of, like, the WYSIWYG interface, and it'll break all of the HTML on their site, and they can't even fix it. And so, like, I don't know. It's just part of that process of, like, if I try to make a WYSIWYG editor here, I kind of remove the creativity element because it'll have to be on some kind of guardrail to make it so that there's a translation between those two things. Let's see. This is just kind of a random site that's on. I just wanted to share. It's the the the Rand friend comic. I I I don't know if some of the links don't work when I embedded in the spreadsheet through the the slide deck thing, but, like, it's just kind of a really demented, comic about I don't know. Just you know? And and and this is getting getting kinda popular. Probably shouldn't you know? It's I don't know. It's just kinda like you know, this stuff like this. Right? You know, it's like you use Twitter, you get, like, a tiny little text box. You type in something. You can maybe embed a video or images or whatever. But when you have the entire screen, you get, like, this crazy control over everything, and you kinda just make whatever you want. And, you know, that kind of creativity resonates with a lot of people. And, you know, it turns off a lot of people too. But, yeah, we're 11 years old at this point. I should probably do, like, a 10 years old, poor squirked them kind of blog post thing. We have about 700,000 sites, and we're up to about 216,000,000 visits a month. And we we put out about a 100 terabytes a month, which is only possible because I use cheap transit with a c with a CDN that I built myself. We actually run our own Anycast network at this point. I as in we're not using Cloudflare's Anycast network. We have actually built our own Anycast network, and the reason there's a lot of reasons for that. The main reason is that CloudFlare, wouldn't give me a they they didn't support wildcard domains for, less than, like, $10,000 a month or something like that when I was doing it. I think they do actually support it now, but at this point, it's kinda like, well, we built the whole damn thing, and it works. So why would we go back? You know? But, yeah, it's a it's a pretty hefty site at this point. And, the governance model, you know, in the context of moderation, it's kind of a benevolent dictatorship, which I I think came out of the you know? And and because it's open source, I guess it qualifies as a OSS benevolent dictatorship, which is, in the I think in the terminology of, the, you know, Eric Raymond's, the cathedral and the bazaar, I think, is where that comes from. But, yeah, it's this idea of, like, you know, fundamentally, like, I am in charge of this project, and, you know, it is kind of, depends on sort of the the whim integrity of me, whether this project is successful or not, which is, you know, sometimes it works really well as, like, a model for platforms and communities, and sometimes it's a nightmare and disaster. You know, there's obviously, like, there's no board of, like, you know you know, policy and transparency systems and all this stuff. It really is just arbitrarily my decision making on a lot of what, you know, the calls are that we make in terms of, like, moderation policy and, like, feature support and stuff like that. Users can block each other if they don't like each other. I mean, that's just kind of a basic thing of just, like, yeah, if you don't wanna be associated with somebody, you can do that. And that's kind of the main model for, you know, dealing with, like, bad actors, which doesn't happen that often. Neo Studies does a very good job of self selecting for less crazy people, because, it's it's it's, like, fundamentally a creativity platform and creatives are just, I think, appreciate the value of creating things versus destroying them more than most people do. And so, it just sort of, you know, them more than most people do. And so it just sort of because of that, you know, we get more, like, artists and creative types, and it just kind of tends to behave better as a community. There's also things we do that kinda prevent people from just coming in and just spamming and trolling everybody. Like, for example, you can't comment on people's sites on NeoCities until you've created your own site. You have to wait at least a week before you can comment, and I think you have to have, like, a I wanna say it's, like, at least five updates to your page or something like that before you can even post anything. And so it just yeah. That sort of gateway of, like, oh, you you have to actually try to make something before we'll let you participate in our community. Also, I think does a really good job of just sort of filtering out a lot of people. And we're funded by supporters, so we don't have an advertising model. We've never had advertising. We don't have I mean, we the only cookie we have is just the session login cookie. You know, I I don't even have I don't have enough to put up the cookie alert pop up thing everyone has to do right now. It's terrible, and I never will, by the way. I'm I'm never putting up the cookie pop up. I hate them. It's just like, let's just get rid of them if we're gonna do it that way. This is another random site. I actually have not seen this one before, but it's, like, one of our popular ones. I wish I could show you this, but the guy that's falling with the broken plastic bag, you actually can usually stop him from doing that by putting your mouse over it. But, again, because I embedded it, the web page is being weird. But it's kinda fun to just kinda stop him from falling into the the thing he's falling into or whatever. I don't even know what that thing is. It looks like a oh god. It looks like a furnace or something. It's kinda morbid. You know, NeoCities is a mostly a successful and positive platform. We do have problems, obviously. I mean, one of the big problems that everyone told me was gonna be the reason it would never work is just that web pages are dangerous now. You know, web pages back in the nineties could just render HTML, and now it is just sort of one of these things where, they're they're sort of, like, highly contained embeddable execution environments, you know, like they're like a browser is like a virtual machine at this point because JavaScript is so powerful that you can program pretty much anything in a browser now. And in fact, on the Geosase archive, we actually, well, Faras made this, but it it it's a midi synthesizer that's built inside JavaScript. So you actually can add back the midi functionality of web pages now by using code for JavaScript that actually can be a midi synthesizer and and and spit out audio. So, like, you know, there's a lot of, concern, you know, responsibilities that go with that process. You know? Like, you have to be careful about what you kind of can implement and stuff. Lots of, you know, the more we more popular the news space gets, the more we're around, the more our page rank goes up, which makes all the scammers and spammers and SEO people wanna dump a bunch of garbage on NeoCities, and so we get a fair amount of the spam we gotta deal with and stuff. Nothing too crazy. Phishing attacks, you know, Facebook login pages and stuff like that. We it actually got so bad that we finally got to the point where we had to put some restrictions on the ability to sort of send, post data to external websites because you can't actually store, like, login information on NeoSudis. It's totally static. There's no back end, storing information component of NeoSudis whatsoever. But what people would do is, like, put the front page on NeoSudis, and then they'd have some server somewhere that would store for the login credentials for phishing attacks. And we finally kind of started not allowing that, and I haven't had any phishing attacks actually since we turned it on. So that's been helpful because, obviously, that stuff risks your page rank. If Google is getting a bunch of attacks from your site, they're kinda like, well, shit. We gotta start deranking this stuff. And I wanna keep everyone's page rank high, you know, so that people, you know, get good good visits to their sites and high quality rankings on the engines. Crazy people, you know, the bad kind. Every once in a while, it's like you get people that show up. It's, you know, because it's free web hosting, but then, like, you know, people kind of tend to treat free things like free things. You know what I mean? Like, they they treat that, like, certain applies the value. So you get a lot of you know, people are trying to cause problems and stuff. Not as many as you'd imagine, actually. It's generally, like, a pretty friendly community. Bad stuff as in just, you know, objectionable content on a high level. Again, pretty rare. Don't really have to deal with too much of that. And then, you know, the whole the comedy, you know, occasional state actors, bots, whatever. We get a few bots here and there, but, like, you know, I'm pretty it's pretty easy to to deal with that. And, terrorism's kind of a funny one. We actually when, the whole Afghanistan thing was going on, there was this one guy that was, like, posting just, like, I don't know, like, Taliban propaganda or something, and, like, it isn't a big deal. I think he only posted, like, two pages and, like, less than thousand people looked at it or something, and I just blocked it right abandoned it right away. But it was kinda weird. It was a funny story with that is usually when the FBI wants subpoena information, which we get, like, a couple times a year, we get, like, subpoena requests and stuff. They, usually just send me an email, but that that time, they actually showed up to my house, presumably, because they wanted to, like, you know, take a look at me or whatever and see if I was, like, a terrorist or whatever. And, I'm in my underwear because it was during COVID, and, I mean, no one was you know what I mean? Like, it was and no one was, like, leaving the house or whatever. But I I I let I let them in while I got the data for them because it's Minnesota in the winter. It's cold. You can't really just, like, leave people outside. And they're looking at my I've got this giant pile of, like, camping bug out stuff near the table, and they're just like, what's that for, dude? And I'm I'm I'm a I I go ski bombing in the winter with my camper van. So, like, I had a just basically a bug out bag ready to go, and they're just thinking like, oh my god. This guy's crazy or something. I don't know. But, anyway, that's just a random story. Let's see here. A lot of solutions to these problems. Can't talk about all of them. And then my last thing I wanna do here just quickly I know I'm kinda getting quick on I'm getting close to the time here, but just wanna yeah. You know, banning people that are causing problems. And this is, like, the one thing I wanna, like, push publicly more and get just get more people aware of. Like, really, just ban people that cause problems. I think this is the biggest problem with Twitter, honestly, and a lot of people have written about this, and they've done a better job of, like, analyzing this than I ever will, but there's this great article in, MIT tech review that was just called how the truth was murdered that goes into kind of some of the stuff that I consider to be the sort of logical end of Twitter, which was largely attributed, honestly, for me, the inflection point was you know, I don't know if it was necessarily the inflection point, but for purposes of a story, it is. In 02/2008, when there was a Twitter user named Ariel Waldman that was getting a lot of harassment on Twitter, and Twitter's decided, oh, fuck. We're not gonna do anything about it. You know, it's too complicated. You know, we can't do anything about it. And, you know, just a quote from the article I wanna read really quick because I think it really sums it up. I'm not proposing to tell you the magical policy that will fix, you know, crazy, you know, problems or judge what platforms would have to do to resolve themselves with this responsibility. Instead, I'm here to point out as others have before that people had a choice to intervene much sooner, and they didn't. Facebook and Twitter didn't create extremist conspiracy theories and mob harassment, but they chose to run their platforms in a way that allowed extremists to find an audience and make our voices telling them about the harms their business model were encouraging. You know? I I think they're that you know, Ariel is Ariel has observed that, like, you know, she's choosing to have she she said, choosing to have people whose main objective is to constantly spew bad things on their platform as a decision. No one forced them to make that decision. They alone make it. And I feel like increasing they increasingly act as, you know, that it's more complicated than that, but I don't really think it is. And it's not, man. Like, you know, as a as a general thing, what I focus on with content moderation is healthy communities. Not freedom of speech, healthy communities. Because what happens is if you don't focus on a positive, healthy communities with people that are good to each other, you end up with a situation where all the sort of normal people are freaked out and they leave, and you're just left with the sort of troublemakers and and your problem people. You know? And, like, you know, it's it's kinda like that in public spaces too. You know? Like, if you're, you know, if you wanna hang out if you're trying to have lunch outside in a park and it's, like, full of, like, really sketchy people doing hard drugs and stuff, you probably aren't gonna do that very often. Right? And so it really does matter, whether you deal with, like, healthy you know, like, having healthy places for people to congregate or whatever, especially when it's on a macro level like that. Because one of the problems with, you know well, I mean, this is quickly the Mallon site the sentiment algorithms is is things like YouTube where, it's, you know, it's, you know, they look at the numbers and they're like, well, the numbers are going up when we use this one, so we'll just distribute this one. And, you know, I I I don't have any algorithms that, like, from push content, actually. Like, the main algorithm I've ever found is just whether users like a site or not, and that's, like, the main thing, that I use to sort of push new content. And it tends to just create more positive outcomes by just having humans choose things instead of computer algorithms. Like, literally, like, if you follow something and you like because you like it, it's generally better to see what humans wanna see rather than what, like, the algorithm wants to do to maximize advertising or whatever. You know, because we have a supporter model, we don't really have that problem as much. This is just a Mario Brothers or sorry, Nintendo Magazine archive I wanted to show you, but I'm running out of time. So let's see here. I I think just quickly where I think the Internet is going right now because, like, I don't think Twitter is gonna fit a thing for much longer. I mean, it it's just falling apart. The first wave of the Internet was topic focused online forums and news groups. So, like, you know, alt.sports.hockey or whatever or the well even, which was, like, one of the more communal ones, but it was Grateful Dead fans. Right? Like, even that was kinda just like a Deadhead specific forum. And what I think is gonna happen at this point, it well, so Twitter comes in and brings everyone in the same room. Right? Now all of a sudden you're you're the the it's else.news.everything, and you've got, like, you know, the furries are in the same room as, like, the vegans and, like, you know, blah blah blah. And I don't know if that's necessarily, like, a good model for human interaction. I feel like you need to have some kind of separation of interests when it comes to a lot of this stuff. And so I I think what's gonna about to happen here is that online communities are gonna kind of refractionalize into specific groups and interest groups and a lot of private groups, Slack and Discord, which is kinda just IRC, you know, except, you know, the the the modern version of IRC or whatever. I think we're gonna start seeing more of these, like, original kind of Internet structures where, like, the furries hang out in their the furry zone or whatever, and, like, you know, the vegans hang out have, like, have their own kind of thing they hang out in or whatever. And I I don't necessarily think that's worse for, like, discourse, honestly. Like, I mean, yeah, those tend to be echo chambers, I guess, but, like, I don't know. I feel like it's just that the people are just sick of battling with each other. They just kinda wanna, like, have their community and just spend time in it, and I think that's where the Internet's kind of headed. Again, I think we're kind of done with the whole, like, I don't know, Panopticon. It's not really a Panopticon, but just, like, this, like, forum where the for everything and all topics and stuff. And, I know you guys talk about decentralized solutions, these problems a lot. So just quickly, if if you do any decentralized solution to these problems, like, you need to figure out a way to moderate them in such a way that, like, communities can kind of form the communities that they want to form. And, you know, unfortunately, most of the solutions to this have not really come to fruition, partly because a lot of the times when you create decentralized technologies, you can't really, do there's not really, the people that are attracted to these are the people that have been kicked off the other platforms, and they just, like, don't wanna get banned again or whatever. And they tend to be people that you don't wanna spend time around, and they go back to that original problem of how do you create a healthy community when there's just a bunch of toxic shit there. But, anyway, that's kinda where I'm at with it. I could stop there and do q and a. And sorry if that was a little long. I guess that it's been about five years since I had to do this. So