I understand mariteaux and Justin Jackson a bit more now (context).
I've been hopping through more Neocities pages then I ever have before... Viewing websites by random and looking through the followers/following lists of sites I find. And man, there really is a large number of visually elaborate but otherwise very empty sites. I still stand by what I said in my essay, that that itself is an act of self expression, and that it has value. There's some pretty good stuff out there, that clearly took a lot of thought and effort to code. So I commend them for that. But when there's nothing to read through, and no sign of them ever coming back to update their site... Well, there's no reason to stick around, no reason to come back. I'm sure I'll stumble upon some of them again, and maybe by then they'll have more to say, more pages with more words. I sure hope so.
And it's not like I think they're worse webmasters or that I'm somehow better than them. I completely understand why these sites get abandoned. It takes time and effort to come up with ideas, code these pages, write out everything you want to say... Plenty of these people have such elaborate ideas for pages, I'm sure, that of course it'd be a daunting task. It's just unfortunate to run into so many "dead ends" is all. Baited in with these beautiful and adorable and very cool layouts, only to find the lands are barren...
My search has not been fruitless, though. I've found some pretty cool sites in the past couple of days. As well as some pretty funny stuff (if you've ever categorized Neocities by random, you'll probably understand what I'm talking about). I'll probably be listing some with their little buttons on my "other sites" page when I finally get around to making that. Which hopefully I will soon!