Late 90's E/N Websites
If you wrote and published a 280 character anecdote to your website in 1999 about how Five Guys fucked you twice when they put onions on your burger for the second time this week when you specifically said, "No onions," many readers would have asked, "Why are they posting this? No one cares."
Enter the Attention Whore
In the age of Twitter and selfie photos from smart phone cameras, it's hard to imagine a time period when the average Internet user was not already accustomed to what they would have called attention whores: people who posted self absorbed blurbs like the one above which are extremely commonplace today. Turning your digital camera around and snapping a pic of yourself was for the most part unthinkable back then. People sometimes did it but they walked with the mark of shame their attention whoring earned them for doing it and I can promise you they would have never let someone in real life see them doing it.
I'm not saying this was necessarily the right way to look at it, but people had certain expectations about what did and did not constitute post-worthy content. In this time period, the Internet was thought of as an information resource, not a dumping ground for minutia. But signs that the Internet was bound for shitposting no matter how much it was looked down upon were apparent even then.
A Website About Nothing
In a post on hearye.org from 1999, the origin of E/N is described as:
The term “Everything/Nothing site” was coined by Geeklife. This was probably influenced by the number of EBG-like sites popping up with the words “everything” or “nothing” in their name. Since then, this new genre has been the umbrella term for the myriad of sites you now see on the sidebar. Some people don’t like it, some people don’t understand it, and some people are still wondering “what the hell does E/N stand for??”
The sites that engaged in writing about whatever they wanted (often anything that would bring traffic) were called E/N websites, because they had no concrete direction or purpose. They could be about everything and nothing all at once at the whims of the webmaster who was posting an update that day.
While some people embraced this, it was more of a designation that many webmasters didn't want associated with what they were doing. It was unprofessional. People who took their content seriously were wary of being associated with this.
As I see it, the term E/N does not detract anything from sites that have been labelled so. I think that some people dislike the term because it associates them with a specific group of sites – it seems to restrict their site’s scope when they want to make it appear different. Having the term “E/N” dumped on your site can lead people to look over your site as “just another one of those E/Ns”.
On the Short Lifespan of E/N
Unless you were "chronicly online" before that was a concept in a very brief span of time in the late 90s, you probably don't know what E/N is, so I'd like to start with talking about why that is.
Most E/N websites were amateur websites built by people with just enough skills to get the site up and running. They were trying to be what more popular websites were and fell somewhere short of that. The ones that you might remember, like Something Awful, may have been large inspirations to the E/N community, but these sites ultimately transcended E/N and are not specifically associated with it due to outliving the phenomenon.
A couple reasons E/N sites died out in my opinion:
1. Search engines
The techniques E/N sites would use to accumulate traffic would over time become less effective. An increase in reliance on search engines to find Internet content played a major role in the downfall of E/N.
Have you ever thought about why a modern day YouTuber will post the same genre of content over and over until they are sick of making it? It's because Google's algorithm will prioritize their content in search results if their content is all targeting the same audience with posts about the same subject matter. The same is true for websites.
This is only the second post I've published to divsel.com and if I continue on this trajectory of writing about the old Internet exclusively, Google is going to reward me by showing this website to people who search for old Internet related content. But If I suddenly start posting pictures of my dog and commenting about the latest video games, Google is going to lean towards not showing my site in results for either subject, prioritizing only the most focused content instead of mine.
2. Social writing platforms
Writing on a site like LiveJournal meant that you didn't have to learn anything about webmastering or servers to write. Not only was it acceptable to post whatever you wanted in these spaces, the readers who wanted to consume this type of content were increasingly using these websites already making it easier to get positive feedback about your posts than having your own site.
By the time E/N writers began moving on to LiveJournal and similar websites, they were significantly less interested in blowing up with traffic. They wanted to curate a group of Internet friends who were interested in reading their thoughts. In this era I think it was more common to be your honest self in your writing (or at least the self that you wanted to be), whereas in the E/N era, there was only one virtue: attention on your site.
Regardless of what the reasons were, most E/N sites did not stay up and active for long. In less than half a decade, they quit popping up entirely.
Back in one of my posts from 2000 I answered ‘no’ to the question of whether E/N sites were dead. But I left my own site behind completely by 2002, and as far as I can tell the trend was definitely a goner by the middle of the decade. - ease.gg
Get Hits or Die Trying
As I said, E/N bloggers were not necessarily above doing whatever it took to bring traffic to their sites. It's just that before search engines became what they currently are, there was no incentive not to be loose about what is acceptable to post, aside from being pigeonholed as an E/N site.
Shock Value and Porn
While not every site was the same, it was not uncommon for webmasters to go further than what I described above, like posting pictures of their poop and asking viewers which is the most disgusting or a collection of random camgirl boobs with the site domain written on them in sharpie, asking for submissions from users to send their boobs to be on the site.
E/N bloggers were well networked with other E/N bloggers, cam girl sites, porn sites, and shock content sites. You have to remember, there was no pornhub, there was no chaturbate, there was no 4chan, there was no one to report you to for posting crime scene investigation photos or literally anything you can think of. If someone wanted their site to be found in the age before Google, they had to affiliate with other people who had websites.
I could go on talking about how these other genres of website were different in those days, but let's just say simply that every genre of website needed each other to reach an audience. Obviously different web masters had different scruples about what they were willing to do and with whom. But most were not above having a link to this or that in their side bar if it meant getting a plug from that site, no matter how fucked up and weird it was, and their most vanilla viewers simply knew not to click on it again if they didn't want to see it.
Controversy and Gossip
E/N website creators knew their visitors were consuming other E/N content, so they spent a lot of time talking about each other. It's actually very similar to the way modern day YouTubers will gossip about each other, and oftentimes will actually lean into it rather than be bothered by it. After all, being talked about means attention, and attention means traffic.
An E/N site could have an entire staff of guest writers who all had their own sites. Sometimes even loyal viewers would be given posting ability if it meant there would be a continuous stream of new content on the site. After all a site about everything and nothing has room for just about anything someone might want to post.
The stakes were lower back then. You weren't going to be a star like a modern day content creator, but some things about today's Internet grew from this forgotten scene of website creators who wanted attention on their websites for the sake of it.
E/N in the Age of Social Media
A lot of times when we talk about the old Internet it's through a filter of how it was so much more genuine and good back then. And in some ways it was. But if those E/N creators were around today creating, they'd be on Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok, or Instagram. They'd be playing by different rules but still attention whoring along with everybody else. And in that way, the modern Internet owes its legacy to them.
So what am I doing here? In some ways I'm exactly like old E/N site writers. There's not a lot I wouldn't do to drive traffic to my website, the main reason being I put a lot of work into developing divchan, an imageboard forum. I'd like to see more people find it and have a community there that remembers what the Internet used to be like. This puts me at odds somewhat with the typical modern ways of driving traffic, because I can't just spam links on social media and expect those users to step out into and actually use an alternate Web from the one they are used to. As social media users, they'll be plugged right back into their feeds in no time.
For me it's not attention for its own sake that I want. Engagement on Twitter for example means nothing to me if it doesn't translate to activity on my boards and the rest of my site.
Comment on this post on the board