The indie web has the strage capability of attacting a very specific group of attention seekers, those who want attention, but seem more concerned about getting it in ways other than Instagram followers (actually nekoweb and neocities do have followers but...)

If you look at any chatbox follow4follow chain this is pretty obvious, but I think it's most interesting manifestation is in 88x31s. 88x31s are so insignificant, and in a lot of cases, people just relinquish them to a random page on their site, but quite frankly, I don't think anyone really cares that they are.

88x31s effectively serve as an indicator of how supposedly far reaching your site is, odds are nobody will actually click on it, but that's fine. People put 88x31s out so that they can see them on other sites, and add the 88x31s of others onto their sites with the intention of this being reciprocated.

You could consider it to be an extremely primitive form of viewer analytics, as based on where yoru button shows up, and what it's hosted on, you can see the types of people, and how popular the people who endorse your site are.

I know for a fact that there's people (including myself, yes, im part of the subject of this article..) who actively look for their own 88x31s when skimming the button sections of websites. I suspect that of these people, very few actually click on the buttons to other sites. Afterall, what can you really learn abbout a site from a single 88x31 rectangle?

This is further bolstered by the fact that, should you perform analytics, the greatest yielder of visits for your site will most likely be Nekoweb or Neocities itself, as opposed to individual sites who have linked you.

In my eyes, 88x31s owe their existence to being the earliest form of ego surfing. It was just a way to see how popular site was, and to a degree, it still is, albeit, it's far more of an art form now, some people have some really cool stuff on their buttons.

I wrote this all after being awake for 30 hours, 50/50 shot it's incoherent. I'm not proofreading this shit, though, TM out.