Geocities is back
LLMs might be making us worse writers, but they're helping us reclaim the personalized web.
When ChatGPT 3.5 came out, I remember thinking that the way we write would forever be changed. Unfortunately it has, and not for the best.
No matter if you’re reading blogs, PR, emails, social posts…you find yourself cringing at the same old patterns:
- The emdash (I think LLMs get this wrong by the way - no wonder - the right way to use dashes is by sandwiching a thought, not standalone)
- Speaking in 3s
- Excessive emojis
- A sing-song, almost rhyming cadence
It is generally accepted that LLMs make writing easier. But does it make the output better? I think not. What we have is a reversion to a 75th percentile of written quality.
Now that Claude Code has taken a firm grasp of many engineers’ work (and even some marketers like mine), I can’t help but remember a time in the early 2000s.
Geocities and low-code
The year was 2005, and I was a junior in high school. I was using products like Microsoft FrontPage and Mozilla Composer to build webpages. I had a Geocities site, a LiveJournal, and a couple years later I would even host my own page on Google Sites.
What I remember about that time was that building a website was accessible with the WYSIWYG tools like Geocities. Many people had them, and they were places where creative expression (no matter how ugly) was ubiquitous.
The other day I rebuilt this website (chrisreuter.me), moving it off of Jekyll and onto Astro. When I did that rebuild, I also added a code-turned-cinema theme to my site - it had famous movie stills as ASCII backgrounds, movie billboard titles, etc.
Soon after I changed it again into a more minimal style, the one that you see now (as of this writing on March 9th, 2026).
I found myself recalling 2005 all over again. While LLMs might be making us dumber, lazier, and worse writers…it means that creative expression is easier than it has been in the past 20 years.
What happened to us in the interim? Social media, frameworks, systems on rails, Tailwind, etc…Personalized sites became harder to build, but things like Facebook profiles became easy (and the de facto standard).
So while I may find myself cringing as I read all of your social posts (and even some of mine), I take solace in knowing that LLMs are helping us reclaim one of the greatest parts of Web 1.0: the personalized Geocities page.