Reached 100 actual downloads on my Geocities site in 1998 and was mad

Everyone always talks about hitting a big number as a good thing, right? Well I had a page on Geocities about my cat collection and somehow got 100 real downloads of a midi file I made. But here's the thing, it made me realize how empty that victory felt because most of those visitors were just bots from search engines or people who hit the wrong link. I actually preferred when it was just 5 people who left comments on my guestbook. Does anyone else remember feeling disappointed when a milestone didn't match the hype?

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1 Comment

young.emma15h ago

The real kicker nobody talks about is how these milestones mess with your head about what success even means on a personal level. I had a similar thing happen with a fan art page I ran in 1999 where I got excited about traffic stats until I realized half the visitors were just people searching for "cats" on Webcrawler. It's like the internet tricked you into thinking you achieved something when all you did was exist at the right time for a keyword search. Those 5 guestbook comments probably meant more because they came from real humans who actually engaged with your cat collection and your MIDI file, not just accidental clicks or automated scripts. We built these sites for community and expression, not for numbers that ultimately felt hollow and disconnected from the actual work.