Districts

[Cele]

I just realized the districts website, which is one of the most followed on Neocities, has been inactive for over a year. This made me think, since the districts concept itself is something from Geocities: is it needed in the current year? Is it needed on Neocities? Or other opinions on the concept?

[Memory]

I think it was always a weird concept: it was meant to connect people of the same interests by ordering websites by interest. But with modern search features and also more importantly the fact that people just don't tend to have a website about one single topic anymore, I think it's kind of obsolete.

[Melooon]

I always found districts a little unnecessary; it was solely a directory for neocities, but it didn't offer anything better than the neocities directory itself. People liked the idea, but it wasn't all that useful.

Districts also always had a transparency issue. It's really unclear who runs it or why. The descriptions they gave sites were always somewhat arbitrary and there was no way to change your info or have your site added/removed without making a public post on Neocities (and hoping they didn't just ignore you). They say it's just one person running it, if they had made it an open-source project that people could submit edits to on GitHub that would have been more manageable.

All that said, it is a nice time capsule of what neocities was like when it was still new to me, so I enjoy that; I recognise so many of the names on there from my early days 

[debleb]

i don’t think they’re really all that useful especially for neocities tbh, as neat and retro as the idea is it doesn’t offer anything that the neocities site browser doesn’t and i’ve never found the categories it has particularly helpful finding sites myself.

[sig]

It's not really much more useful than the common link section of any other site, other than the categories I think. It could be more useful if it updated regularly, but it doesn't...

[Melooon]

I was never really part of any district or webring back in the day, what is the difference between a district and a webring anyway? Aren't they basically the same thing? 

@Cele seems to be specifically talking about this site: https://districts.neocities.org/ which was made to replicate the Geocities districts - it's basically a directory that groups sites into different categories that it calls districts ^^

[Cele]

@Cele seems to be specifically talking about this site: https://districts.neocities.org/ which was made to replicate the Geocities districts - it's basically a directory that groups sites into different categories that it calls districts ^^

Ah yes that was the website I was referring to. I should've linked it.

[JackFrost]

I forgot about districts. Im pretty sure I was on there and they just forgot to change it to my new site forever ago. Where did it go?

[Memory]

That's a mascot down the drain!

[Cele]

I keep seeing it because it's the third most followed website on Neocities and I tend to go to the website browse quite often. It has gained 5 new followers within the last 24 hours despite not having been updated for over a year Unrelated but I do wish people would tag their sites so I could find them from the website browse easier

[fizzylimesoda]

the owner of districts is the guy beinhd "neocities and a lack of passion"

[debleb]

the owner of districts is the guy beinhd "neocities and a lack of passion"

what’s that? is it an article or something?

[PurpleHello98]

Honestly, I kind of like the concept---I find it to be a nice way to discover sites where I know vaguely what they're about beforehand, and it never really crosses my mind to search by tags, since often tags only represent a small part of what the site's about, like with my site, since I just throw whatever I want on there it's thematically diverse. However, I feel like Neo-Neighbourhoods pulled it off much better than Districts, since it uses the actual layout and neighbourhoods from Geocities, of which there are much more---thus, more categories rather than just ten or so, so you can find what properly fits your site---and this also means that it feels much more nostalgic than Districts, which is a totally new thing; plus, Neo-Neighbourhoods still gets updated semi-regularly at least, last time I checked.

[Cele]

what’s that? is it an article or something?

Maybe it's this one? http://archives.somnolescent.net/web/mari_nc2/essays/passion.html

It's kinda mean. Seems like the Districts account was.. stolen from them?

Honestly, I kind of like the concept---I find it to be a nice way to discover sites where I know vaguely what they're about beforehand, and it never really crosses my mind to search by tags, since often tags only represent a small part of what the site's about, like with my site, since I just throw whatever I want on there it's thematically diverse. However, I feel like Neo-Neighbourhoods pulled it off much better than Districts, since it uses the actual layout and neighbourhoods from Geocities, of which there are much more---thus, more categories rather than just ten or so, so you can find what properly fits your site---and this also means that it feels much more nostalgic than Districts, which is a totally new thing; plus, Neo-Neighbourhoods still gets updated semi-regularly at least, last time I checked.

I have trouble figuring Neo-Neighbourhoods out ^^'''

[Kallistero]

The thing with Districts is that people have already re-imagined the concept in a lot of ways, just in other contexts. For instance, you have the many ways that people have visualized the "locations" and link structures of Wikipedia pages:

https://seealso.org/

It's probably more appropriate to have districts defined in some organic way like Wikiverse does, as the "location" of a site on a classic-Web substructure like this is going to be defined by the links between the pages. That's what a Web surf is all about. The site owner is interested in the pages that they link to, so their site will be floating around some average between those pages. My district is between pages X, Y, and Z, and if my interests change, my district will probably move with that, as I add new links to reflect my new interests (or even remove my old interests).