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Stuff goes down on the internet a lot. Sometimes it makes me sad.
Wiby is a search engine with a very cool premise. It’s a handmade index of pages that embody old web principles - simplistic, personal, interesting. But if you try the “surprise me” feature, where you get a random site in its collection, it may get depressing quick. Websites which remain, but haven’t been touched in years, if not decades. It’s hard not to get a weird feeling out of that - or maybe that’s just me.
When the website Razorback spontaneously shut down a few years ago, it gave me that feeling again. It’s sort of why I’m writing this. Just to get some closure.
To say more, Razorback (razorback95.com) was a personal web site by an anonymous whale named Kugee. It was aquatic themed, was designed to work on browsers as old as 1995, and was a very fleshed-out site; there was a blog, an images gallery, several tutorials, information on projects Kugee was working on, videos, a Twitter-style microblog called “Blips”, and more. And one day, it was all gone. It now redirects to a new domain, drevonor.com. It is a single black page with links to just 2 Kugee projects, and a picture of a whale. That is pretty much it.
How could Kugee do that? It was such a cool site. All that effort working on it, writing posts, for what? It helped people and it was even a go-to site to test old web browsers, in my and many other people’s experiences. That’s how I felt.
But I suppose I’m not really owed anything. It’s his site, his server.
I know websites, as simple as they may seem, can impact a person a lot. That goes for almost everything in life that you have to create and maintain. People expect you to keep it going, but if the drive is no longer there, what can you really do? Even when no one is actively invested in my site like people were for Razorback, I have felt that stress, and guilt a lot.
I don’t know if that is how he felt, but I’m trying to say that it’s not always a spontaneous decision. Sometimes it really is best to call it quits.
Even leaving the site actively hosted has effects. People would actively stumble on it, wonder why there’s no content, maybe feel bad or sad. At least, that’s how I am. But if you’re instead reading it on archive.org’s Wayback Machine, you accept the finality of it. That it’s over.
When Razorback went down, I tried contacting someone on a site he linked to - a friend of his, I reasoned. Kugee took down the site because he was unhappy with the lack of attention, I was told.
I don’t know. I still don’t like that way of thinking, at least for something as drastic as disappearing from the net. You shouldn’t be in it just for views, honestly.
These actions have ripple effects. Even if only a few people care, it means they will be impacted.
But I don’t want to shame Kugee. Maintaining a website, a viewership, and, in certain ways, a community, is really damn hard y’know?
So just do what you want, I dunno. I don’t really have a point here, just wanted to write about some feelings. Just know that the things you do will inspire people, any thing you do will. It inspired me to write this post, after all.
Go check out Kugee’s work – I recently found out he reached out to a friend to archive and remaster his videos on YouTube.
Note: After letting this draft sit for a few weeks, the Drevonor website updated. Dang 👀 I look forward to the new projects!