Neocities.org

I have posted a pretty long (at least 1 page) log entry going into my reasoning in greater depth. Boundary setting and standing on moral principle has become more important than ever in the past few years. I don't even feel like it is a "choice" anymore after what I stumbled upon today. I was apparently oblivous about to for a while. There is too much evidence of disingenous sophistry. My trust is about zeroed out.

A person should not have to repeatedly be forced to migrate from place to place just to even have their most basic human rights as creators and thinking people respected, but here we are. These past several years have truly shown people's real colors. The one upside of theft-based AI systems is that they have become a very telling litmus test for people's morality or lack thereof. Convenience never justifes theft.

On a more positive note though, this coming shift to new circumstances will enable yet more ground for expressing myself. In particular, it will become likely possible for me to implement my own suggestion of hosting a traditional forum, which is not possible really on Neocities. Other aspects of my outlook have also been improving lately in ways that matter, such sustaining and completing another creative project.

I think you're really misconstrueing what Kyle said about this. He was talking about malicious services that masquerade as "AI crawl defense." Check this thread: https://bsky.app/profile/neocities.org/post/3lgbr3cld4k2z

Nah, I wasn't talking about that "AI crawl defense" stuff really. My decision to leave was more about his whole dismissive attitude towards all anti-AI people. I read a bunch of the related stuff and got bad vibes in several respects. Also, the expectation that web masters need to add AI exclusions to protect themselves remains quite morally backwards. One shouldn't need to tell every thief not to steal from oneself.

All of the items I have available are widely useful and/or deeply interesting and effortful. I have: (1) a massive research textbook in formal logic, (2) a small and broadly applicable game dev book, (3) an indie license agreement that is more flexible and useful than Creative Commons, and (4) a massive 500 seamless texture pack that could be applied to countless different things. All of these are very widely useful.

Moreover, all of the items are also extremely cheap as of the current costs I've set for them. I also supposedly receive views ranging from ~25 to 300 per day from Neocities and yet the numbers don't seem to add up in terms of analytics on the other sites, not even accounting for how low "conversion rates" are across the whole web. So, that has struck me as quite odd for a long while now. Any thoughts on that?

I like the Neocities community and the strength in numbers it potentially provides, but without the ability to trace where the views are coming from I have become increasingly skeptical of the nature of them and have begun to think of my view count as essentially a random number generator with no connection to reality. I like the community here, but I am afraid I may soon need to move someplace with real site stats.

i manually counted the number of images on my homepage (currently the page with the highest number of images since i disabled my gallery) and the numbers don't add up. it says on the stats tracker that if a page has 6 files, 6 hits will be counted, but the hit count is WAY too low assuming people are coming in through my index page. i'm not even a subscriber and my numbers make no sense.

Thanks for the info badgraph1csghost. 😎 It's always good to hear from you. I hadn't even thought about the image loading inconsistencies but was largely fixated on inconsistencies in traffic numbers associated with links on my site that do (unlike Neocities) have a greater degree of analytics or at least different data sets. It still doesn't make a lot of sense. Either way though, I'll need to find a way forward.

I picked quite an inopportune time to try to start making a living on the internet it feels like. Either that, or I just haven't found a good approach to getting more real traffic yet. I'll just have to keep making new attempts and alterations until I get there I guess. Perhaps I am just clueless about what most people do. I do somewhat "live under a rock" and am often swamped trying do so many different things.