The death of GeoCities: seeking destruction and platform eulogies in Web archives

Abstract

Abstract GeoCities was once one of the most popular platforms on the web. This free web-hosting site was a place where people from a range of geographic and socio-cultural locations could build their own websites and communities online. In 1999, Yahoo! acquired the platform in a historic USD$3.7B transaction, but the following decade saw the platform decline into a state of near total non-use. In 2009, it was taken offline. This paper demonstrates how the GeoCities web archives can be used to find digital traces of destroyed web pages and “platform eulogies” from the user’s perspective that provide insights into the tensions that ultimately led to GeoCities death.