Weren't the Geocities accounts numbered, with icons? Didn't you need to find an empty account from amongst the "neighborhood" of sites?

Yeah! When the log-in system was introduced, there seemed to be no good reason to even want to log in. So...I passed, for a while; I'm confident that others did, too.

However, since this was the place where new users would be called a "troll" and blasted for posting an innocent question or an unpopular remark, and since this was the first place where I ever saw the words "better then" used to compare two things, I knew there was something special, worth holding onto. I had to get that Slashdot log-in.