Mostly, the internet is worse now than it was 20 years ago — but at least it looks better. Now that “going online” is more often a job than a hobby, the internet looks appropriately sleek to match: by adults and for adults, by professionals and for professionals. Platforms have different personalities, from the cutesy quirk of Etsy to the clean, friendly usability of Slack. But, in general, if a website is popular, if it is large enough to be the primary income source for its creators, it is both navigable and beautiful in a minimalist, Scandinavian-boutique-hotel sort of way. The look of a website is intentional and made by a well-paid committee. Very little about the internet’s appearance, short of a bug quickly remedied, is an accident.

But there was a time recently when most of the internet was an accident, a thing people did while they were doing something else, a guilty pleasure. And one of the few places that blasé vibe still exists is a certain brand of celebrity gossip blog, a cadre of Peter Pan sites that have never grown up because they never had to.

One of the most prominent of these sites is the mega-popular, infamous blind-item gossip site Crazy Days and Nights, with its black background, white text, pale green headlines, and a header banner depicting a nighttime Hollywood landscape, crowded on all sides by garish ads. Enty, the blog’s anonymous proprietor, describes his design choices, and the fact that the site exists at all, as an offhand decision that was barely intentional.

“I started the site one day when I was bored at work,” he tells The Verge. “I chose Blogger because it was free and took two minutes to set up. I don’t remember why I chose the colors I did. Mysterious, maybe?”

The design feels iconic now, but perhaps only by virtue of the fact that nothing else looks like it anymore. Enty, for his part, did attempt an update at one point. “For about a three-year period, I tried WordPress and used servers and everything that goes with it. I hated it,” he says. “The colors were different, the layout was different. It was a nightmare. The other nine years have all been on Blogger, always the same style and format.”

Today, the site looks entirely unchanged from its mid-’00s creation. Conventional wisdom might hold that a website should always look as current and of-the-moment as possible, but Crazy Days and Nights proved to be an exception to that rule. The update was infuriating for the site’s creator in part because of WordPress’ comparative usability, but also because it changed the very thing the site offers.

That low-effort aesthetic is all part of the distinctive feeling of Crazy Days and Nights. The familiarity defines it — for both its creator and its audience. Over the past 15 years or so, most gossip blogs have, like Enty, refused to update their design significantly. The reasons vary, but the results make these blogs a unique little time capsule corner of the internet.

Neon text on black backgrounds. Text that spins and sparkles and bubbles and pops. Paragraphs in which the text changes color two or three or eight times for no reason at all. Obtrusive background images and blinding pop-up ads that follow you around the page. Websites in the late 1990s and mid-‘00s didn’t look like a minimalist office; they looked like a party thrown by a hideously uncool college student who had taken a lot of acid and then decorated their dorm.

Perhaps the zenith of this aesthetic was Myspace. Myspace was always yelling. Everyone used the “SpongeBob meme font,” but it wasn’t a way to make fun of people; it was jUsT hOw PeOpLe TaLkEd aBoUt ThEmSelVes. It was hideousness — not merely as a visual aesthetic, but as an overwhelming version of the world. It was like an ugly, forced cheerfulness or a party full of the absolute worst people you’ve ever met that’s a little bit more fun than it should be, but one you’ll regret attending if you stay for more than 30 minutes. (If you’ve watched NBC’s The Good Place and seen its depiction of The Bad Place, that’s exactly what Myspace was like.)

The Myspace era was also the heyday of brand-new celebrity gossip blogs like Crazy Days and Nights. In the mid-aughts — when anyone with an internet connection could suddenly accrue a readership in a way previously unprecedented — blogs began competing with tabloid magazines as the place to get the best, meanest, and most immediate celebrity gossip. Lainey Gossip, Crazy Days and Nights, Perez Hilton, DListed and Oh No They Didn’t all started between 2002 and 2007. The party kid celebrities of that era, with their Myspace pages, rehab stints, party hijinks, and coke habits, all fostered a minute-by-minute reporting to which the internet was far better suited than print tabloids.

When asked about his original vision for the site, DListed founder and creator Michael K says, “I had no vision. I had no expectations.” He never expected it to become a professional endeavor. “DListed was a hobby for me. I honestly thought it would last a few months, max. When I first started the site, I mainly wrote for myself since I was the only one visiting it. When I realized that people were actually reading it, I wrote less and less about myself and more and more about celebrities and pop culture. The site became a job, a business, and I later brought on other writers to produce content more quickly.”

DListed was part of a small group of semi-professional gossip sites that, in many cases, became bigger than their creators imagined they would be. “A lot of tabloids were slow to jump onto the Internet and capitalize off of it, so the creation of independently run gossip blogs was inevitable,” says Matt James, creator of the popular Tumblr Pop Culture Died in 2009. “People said whatever about whoever, and because there wasn’t social media as this aggregate to really connect everyone, unless you were making a conscious effort to read a particular blog, a lot of things went unchecked.”

Some of these blogs, of course, have undergone a redesign, updating their aesthetic to be somewhat more current and their sites to be more easily usable. Michael K, for instance, chose to change DListed’s look from its original free Blogger template through several updates to its current, professionally designed iteration.

Many of these sites, however, have never changed. Even those that redesigned are still louder, tackier, and more swollen than their more contemporary counterparts. To visit them now is like getting in a time machine with a destination that is set to 2003. It’s like stepping backward through the internet and emerging into the neon frontier town of cheerful hideousness that existed a decade ago.

Perez Hilton has gotten a few visual updates, making the site feel more modern than many of its competitors, but its color scheme is still a screaming rainbow dominated by neon Barbie pink. Lainey Gossip has undergone several site makeovers since its official founding in 2004, but it still retains the loudly color-clashing logo and bare-bones, basic blogger aesthetic of a previous decade. Oh No They Didn’t, a popular LiveJournal gossip community founded in 2004, is, well, still on LiveJournal. And, of course, after its brief foray into WordPress, Crazy Days and Nights has retained the exact look with which it began. All are heavily festooned with moving, blinking, and highly invasive ads. Visiting any one of them still has a Myspace feeling to it, which is at once gross and welcome.

This stubborn sameness may simply be financial. While many of these blogs still boast enormous readerships — Lainey Gossip enjoys over 1.5 million unique visitors per month, as of 2016 — they have nevertheless been rendered less profitable by the newer version of the internet. Facebook and Twitter are better and more efficient means of transmitting the same information. James guesses that the relationship between the changing internet and these unchanged sites is simply a matter of practicality.

“I think their dated layouts are mostly due to the fact they’re not exactly rolling in cash,” he says. “They do their best with what they have. I don’t think it’s deliberate, but more so practical.” The old designs are ugly, but they still work. Without a bunch of extra cash lying around, there is no reason to invest in fixing the design of something that already does what it’s meant to do. While all of these sites are still profitable, even Lainey Gossip cites monetary considerations in her FAQ as the reason for not making an app.

But, as with Enty’s reasoning, it could also be more intangible than that: the original designs, as ugly as they were, are part of what defined and branded these sites. To make them neat, elegant, and conformatively modern would be to make them less familiar to the reader. While these sites’ creators are always hoping to increase their traffic, they are, in general, not seeking to leverage their work on the site into a more prestigious job, and they are thus beholden only to their readers. Even those professionally redesigned sites remain loyal to a mid-‘00s aesthetic, likely because the memory of that time is part of what these sites offer. To lose that might drive readers away.

The cozy familiarity of these sites and their financial concerns are certainly linked: that time-traveling authenticity is part of what they are selling. Nostalgia happens lightning-fast online now; everything is always receding into the distance and becoming eulogy fodder. Not long ago, LiveJournal was a thing most people were embarrassed to mention; now, if someone says “LiveJournal,” half the room sighs wistfully. Eventually, anything can become nostalgia if it stays the same long enough.

When I ask Michael K if there is a nostalgic aspect to DListed’s readership, he responds, “Definitely. There’s a core group of devoted readers who have been checking in since nearly the beginning, and I believe that many of them continue to visit because of the nostalgia.” Enty agrees. “Since I returned to the original format a year or so ago, the traffic has steadily increased. I think people enjoy the familiar.”

Gossip blogs, with their acidic hearts and mercenary approach to human emotion, seem like an unlikely target for wistful sentiment. And yet, if these sites feel somehow nostalgic, it may be less for their aesthetics and more because so little of the internet remains a low-stakes guilty pleasure that finding one feels like going back in time 10 years.

James cites his own longing for a less sanitized and smoothed-over internet: “I do miss a time when there was a lot more snark when it came to coverage of celebrity.” It’s a longing that also contributed to his creation of a Tumblr in tribute to this recently past era. “That’s gone now, for the most part.”

There is certainly no shortage of gossip sites on the internet now. But for James, the difference is in the tone and the approach; that difference sets apart this more polished era from a previously uncensored one.

“I mean, look at E! Online,” he says. “They used to have fun columnists that took the piss out of celebrities. Us Weekly used to be the bible, there would be a serious effort that went into their stories back in the Janice Min days. But when you flip through a current issue, it’s as hard-hitting as someone’s Pinterest feed. Everything’s shaded in pastels; everything is baby showers, diet tips, or Z-List weddings.”

Pastels are tasteful minimalism, the sort of color scheme that might grace a professionally maintained website. They are the opposite of the abrasive Myspace aesthetic. James’ praise of that era speaks to what may keep readers coming back to the gossip blogs of the ‘00s — not in spite of their ugliness, but because of it. Many of us are looking for a relief from pastels.

Gossip blogs are one version of the internet’s id, a place where we go and don’t tell anyone we went. In a time when everything about one’s relationship with the internet is supposed to be public, gossip blogs are still private and impersonal. These are not links that any of us are going to post on our Facebook or Twitter to demonstrate our superior taste or good politics. We are not going to use a blind item to “start a conversation” in the ceaseless-networking parlance of social media.

We’re also all getting older. “The demographics of readership hasn’t changed too much over the years,” says Michael K. “If anything, the demographic has gotten older since people have aged with the site.” While the appeal of these sites seems obvious to someone like me, who grew up with them and shares James’ feelings about what they represent, they are also a generational specificity. Nostalgia items are defined by their lack of utility, and Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have long since rendered these sites unnecessary for the basic task of acquiring gossip about celebrities.

It may be inevitable that sites like these wither away as their readership ages. Often, nostalgia is really just expressing that we miss a time when we were younger and had more of our lives ahead of us. If familiarity is what is selling gossip blogs, these sites are not long for this world. But for now, they are a joyously vitriolic museum piece, a record of a moment of transition in both the internet and the larger culture around it. For those of us who grew up with them and have watched the internet age into one big networking event, they still feel like a breath of fresh air.

It’s difficult to believe now, but there was a time when the internet was nowhere instead of everywhere. Before the social internet had mapped so completely onto our social lives that attempting to separate the two or call life away from the internet “real” became a ridiculous endeavor, online was where we went to escape, to be unseen, to be nowhere.

When I started a LiveJournal in 2002, a few of my friends also had them, and more would eventually join. But the point of the thing, the real heartmeat of it, was the strangers there. When LiveJournal was the primary way I existed on the internet, what occupied my time was not my friends’ accounts of their days or their vague, passive-aggressive posts about the drama of which I was already aware. Rather, it was falling into a rabbit hole of total strangers’ personal confessions and vague dramas just as small and unimportant as those unfolding within my own friend group. But these were infinitely more interesting because they were happening to someone I had never met, who didn’t know I existed.

When I made my own humiliatingly verbose and confessional posts, I never imagined the audience to be the few real-life friends who also used the website. I was often embarrassed or even annoyed when these friends referenced those posts in offline conversations. What I loved about LiveJournal, in my early online days, was that it felt like a public space in which I got to talk to no one, a place where I could yell into the void. Putting any part of one’s self online is always a cry for attention to some degree, but sometimes, against all logic, the desire is just as much for the opposite. I want to confess things out loud and be ignored. I want to say the things I can only say if I believe that I am nowhere.

The greatest joy of LiveJournal, and other similar proto-social networks and chat rooms, was their uselessness. There was no reason for any of us to be there, not really. Online sociality may have addressed loneliness, but in its early form, it did as much to simultaneously heighten it, isolating those of us who sought out artificial social lives in two-dimensional typefaces. That uselessness was precisely the thing that the internet offered: this was a place you visited to get nothing done, a place where nothing counted or lasted with benefits or consequences.

Perhaps more than anything else, what has sucked all of the joy out of the social internet in its current form is its exhortation to be useful. We have arrived at a version where everything seems to be just another version of LinkedIn. Every online space is supposed to get you a job or a partner or a stronger personal brand so you can accomplish the big, public-record goals of life. The public marketplace is everywhere. It’s an interactive and immersive CV, an archive. It all counts, and it all matters.

First in the era of America Online, and then in the era of LiveJournal and micro-blogging, the internet was at least partly an escape. It was a place where the boundaries of real life, in which everything was more or less a job interview, could be sloughed off and one could imagine the internet as a quiet, uninhabited space of whispered intimacies. In this era of hyper-usefulness, what seems rarest and most valuable online are spaces that offer, however illusorily, a return to this original uselessness. There are places where, against the constant obligation to be seen and remembered, we might get to be unseen, unrecorded, and forgotten.

It’s not exactly easy to see how many people you follow or how many people follow you on Snapchat, but my guess is that I currently have maybe 150 followers. I follow about 100. But for the last few months when I open the app, I see posts from between two to five of those people. If I post a story, which I do with lesser and lesser frequency these days, seven people view it, at most. These numbers have dwindled steadily, and now my Snapchat has started to feel like an abandoned lot where a building once stood.

The app has never really been my thing. I’ve used it on and off for several years, but only in its recent, ongoing deterioration have I suddenly found it to be a compelling place online. As Snapchat alienates its users and fades further into irrelevance, it has begun to feel, as many failing social platforms do near the end, like a place to access the uselessness and unimportance, the sense of yelling into the void that the internet once offered before what we did here mattered.

When Snapchat first appeared, the buzz surrounding it was based on one feature: the photos you sent on this app disappeared. In 2011, every other form of social media was permanent and archivable, but before Stories or Memories, whatever you sent someone on Snapchat vanished a few seconds after the recipient viewed it, like it had never existed. In 2016, Instagram launched its own version of Stories, which the CEO freely admitted was an exact copy of Snapchat’s Stories feature. The ephemerality that had made Snapchat unique had become popular enough to be cannibalized by other platforms in the hopes of replicating Snapchat’s success.

It worked: today, ephemerality is a standard feature of social media, one we no longer think of as magic, yet everything still has consequences. We are well-aware that nothing really disappears, that everything can be saved, archived, screenshotted. On an internet where privacy has all but vanished and everything “disappears,” it turns out that the more rare and valuable treasure might not be the promise of ephemerality, but of useless spaces. The closest thing we might find to something on the internet that is actually secret is not posts that disappear, but rather a website at the end of its relevance, one that nobody cares about, where nobody is watching.

As recently as summer 2016, Snapchat was having some sort of renaissance. New users were adults almost as often as they were teens. Even The New York Times praised it as “the place where you go to be yourself.” I used Snapchat to document a trip to Savannah and Chattanooga to see my partner’s family, a slow, sweaty summer in New York, and a few visits to Philadelphia, where my parents live. I also documented my face, bedecked with flower crowns and cat ears, with filters that shaved my down my jawline, shortened my chin, and made my skin as smooth and light as glass.

People I knew flocked to Snapchat that summer, and it soon became much like any other social media platform (albeit with more flattering filters). Photos, videos, and texts still disappeared, but archival functions now existed, making it possible to save anything one wanted to save — both of one’s own posts and other users’. People referenced each other’s snaps in posts on Twitter and encouraged followers from other spaces to come over to this one. Snapchat was no more private than the rest of the internet, and like much of the internet, something originally intended for kids was overrun with 20- and 30-something media and tech professionals competing to see how well they could master it.

I lapsed out of using it later that year, partly because too many people had amassed there for it to feel meaningfully different from Twitter, and partly because the few people I really cared about — close friends, my partner — had gravitated back toward other apps. I revisited it about a year later, when a few of those people started using Snapchat frequently again. Even in that relatively short amount time, the space had already become noticeably less populous. The buzz of activity around it was gone.

Snapchat had a bad year. Its profits and stock prices were down, and stories about the company’s questionable spending were being published after its holiday celebrations. Instagram’s Stories feature had more than double the number of daily users. Kylie Jenner, Chrissy Teigen, and, most significantly, Rihanna, had all abandoned the platform in recent months, along with numerous other celebrities. The famous and non-famous alike had been driven away by a redesign so terrible that it generated a Change.org petition to restore the old version, which garnered more than a million signatures. Snapchat already seemed both desperate and irrelevant. No one was arguing that you should make an account anymore or that there was any particular reason to be on it at all.

There were fewer and fewer people I knew active as the months went on. But that didn’t make a difference because the way I was using it had changed. Everyone I followed and their stories had receded. I rarely checked anything other than my chats, and soon, the app’s whole function was to for me to talk to one particular group of friends. The more the outside world departed the platform, the more it made the group chat inside of it feel like a secret clubhouse. It felt as though we were having a private conversation in another room in the house, far away from where the party was happening. I continued to use it to talk to the eight people I wanted to talk to — which became six, and then five, and then four, and then three — as members of the group gave up on the redesign and the app’s many other failures. But I still didn’t leave because the end-times experience of Snapchat is the most I’ve ever enjoyed it.

I posted about the things I would never post about on other platforms: writing, the gym, money, endless photos of my face. All of these are things I know make “bad” social media content. They’re the kinds of posts that generate little engagement, annoy the people reading them, and embarrass the person who made them. They were things I felt private about, parts of my life that were at once legitimately vulnerable and very boring. They were exactly the kind of things I might have posted about on LiveJournal as a teenager, up late, opening her heart to the void. For a brief moment, as everybody abandons the sinking ship, Snapchat genuinely feels like a place where no one might be listening in, like it might really be the void, rather than the sum of everyone else’s phones.

One of my friends who is still resolutely on Snapchat has told me that it gives her, “a space to be visible just to some people, to not have to share everything with everyone in order to share anything with anyone. That, to me, is too high a cost, and it’s a cost that so many other platforms require you to pay.” Another, who finally abandoned the app in recent months, mentioned how she had loved the smallness of it. “I had maybe a hundred people viewing my snaps, so the responses stayed so much less creepy than other places. There’s no way to scroll through a timeline or look at a grid to see if someone is good or bad. That means you end up following mostly people you know, which is so nice because then it’s just a little chat.”

Since the outcry against the redesign, Snapchat has rolled out yet another version of the app, responding in part to the significantly slowed growth that resulted from its new version. The new redesign is supposed to go back to basics and return to the things people loved about the old version and missed in the new one. The previous redesign — built in only six weeks — separated people you knew from celebrities and brands. On the surface, this was meant bring the focus back to interpersonal friendships, but instead, it had an alienating effect. As a not-famous person, it seemed to say that Snapchat wasn’t for us.

This isn’t why people are leaving the platform; they’re leaving because it became difficult to use, disrupting the expectations and patterns that users had built up over time, making the experience a flailing one where it was impossible to find what you actually wanted to see. This redesign of the redesign may still save Snapchat and bring it back to robust growth and relevance. Perhaps this won’t be the death of the app so much as a passing era of growing pains. My experience is limited to a very small group of users, even at my most populous experience of the app. But for the moment, it still feels like a dead space on the internet, a place people have increasingly forgotten. In that, it offers something far more precious than the ephemerality it intended to give us.

The internet is full of consequences now because real life is full of consequences. The membrane between online and real life has long since dissolved. As Snapchat fades into irrelevance, it has less and less to do with our real lives, the ones that count and matter, the ones where we have to be accountable for each action and each sentence. These almost-gone spaces can feel like a party about how you’re leaving town in the morning, replete with a last-night-on-earth sort of permissiveness.

Peach, which never truly caught on and has for most of its life only existed as a barely alive platform, functions as the same kind of private clubhouse for people who use it, a small party where no one is listening. Vine was always great, but it was perhaps at its best in the last weeks before its rumored shutdown, when everyone on it seemed to throw rules and caution to the wind, when every Vine felt like it might be the very last one. Tumblr is a little like this, too. It now feels like an abandoned space that was once a robust destination, and it now feels like a secret. 

When websites become useless, they become a reminder of what was lost when the internet gained purpose, function, and profit. We are all still searching for an online space where we can yell our secrets and be unseen and disappear. These opportunities now often exist only in dying online spaces, the last place where no one is looking.