this page is slightly unfinished so keep that in mind
things to avoid
neocities is a hub for creativity and expression but when you give a bunch of internet nerds free speech and an outlet to express it
you get people like pedos, nazis, lolicons, and criminals expressing their ideologies. lots of these sites host a lot of shit that the
average person shouldnt be seeing. This page of my site will tell you how to avoid these websites by recognizing some dark patterns.
clicking links
the most important thing to know is that it's dangerous to aimlessly click through sketchy links, doing this could result in you ending up on the dark web
or finding illicit content hidden in a breadcrumb website. This is especially dangerous if you're clicking on a link that takes you to a site not hosted on neocities. This is also dangerous if you're clicking around in someone's webring cause you have almost no idea what the site is or the type of person who runs it. Another thing related to that is people will blindly accept sites into their webring just because, and they could host content you don't want to see, also it's not helpful if you yourself are doing this.
warning!!! if you are going to click on that link please note that it is an a accurate example of a breadcrumb website and ive made use of excplicit language (the inspiration for this comes from LHOHQ)
this is what a breadcrumb site looks like this is an example of a breadcrumb website
edgy vs sketchy
a lot of neocities websites are made by teenagers that kinda just wanna be edgy (which is fine no judgment im kinda doing the same which is a bit counterproductive lol), but alot of the times in order to evoke a sense of fear and mystery the websites are made to look sketchy. one thing to note when trying to figure out if a website is safe is to try to find a connection between all of the content on that site. if there seems to be no rhyme or reason to whats on the site then its probably a sketchy site. another thing to look out for is if the website is trying to sell you something, .com can either mean commerce or commercial, commercial websites make up the majority of edgy websites while commerce websites make up sites that try to sell you things. if a weird website is trying to sell you something than its probably not edgy. its also important to note that downloading things off sketchy websites is risky and you should do a bit of research.
its important to note that its
almost impossible to avoid these sites
(infact well making this I ended up on a
fake amazon website and had to run 5 virus
scans to make sure my computer was okay)
so you dont have to strictly follow everything
I say but you should keep this stuff in mind
and try to stay away from sketchy sites