Where is girlsnet?
- James Kuckkan
- Sep 24
- 13 min read
Updated: 6 hours ago
From forgotten forums to billion-dollar feeds, women have been shaping the Internet since its first lines of code
This feature traces the hidden history and future of girlsnet — the women who built the foundations of the web, carved out cultural spaces like Gurl.com and ChickClick, endured the fallout of Gamergate, and now dominate the attention economy of platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
The City on the Horizon
Right now, billions of people live and work in the same city.
It’s a young city, even by modern standards—just eighty years old, forty if you’re only counting when it became open to the public.
It started, as all cities do, with a few pioneers eking out a meager living in a vast frontier. Day after day, their diligent labor yielded exponential results. The city grew from a small patch of ground into a humming little neighborhood. Then a group of them. Eventually, it built structures which now govern the world. Towering monoliths that militaries, governments, and megacorporations call home, rising among the bustling neighborhoods that make up its majority, occupied by most of the global population.
The Founding Fathers of this city are well known: Tim Berners-Lee. Jobs and Wozniak. Gates. Newer aristocrats have emerged too, like Zuckerberg, Brin, Altman, and Thiel. The cultures and attitudes they left behind, or are actively shaping, currently appear to hold the reins of power. Their hand steers the city towards their horizon.
There is another group, however, who has been here since the beginning. They laid some of the first roots, built some of its earliest roads. They created rich cultures that far outstrip their counterparts with more press. Now, after decades, they have captured vital centers of global culture, commerce, and bureaucracy. This group, sooner, rather than later, may be the ones who steer the city to their own horizon.
The boys and the net they made play a hard game. But the girls have been here just as long–and their net knows a thing or two about patience, and change. All it takes is time.
Meet girlsnet (you’ve met before)
Women have been a part of the Internet since its initial foundation—some of them wrote the primordial code or literally laid the primary cable networks responsible for creating the spaces more than 5.7 billion people access online today, every day.
In the realm of Internet culture as well, women’s spaces make up some of the most known and the most obscure parts of the digital frontier. They exist everywhere, from small-time zines with a cult-following last active twenty-odd years ago, to storytelling forms with more pages of writing than some of history’s largest libraries, audiences and creators on massive, famous digital platforms, to thousands of small projects scattered across the rolling computer wilderness.
The ubiquity the Internet has attained in daily life means the history and culture of girlsnet is a contributing force in global history, and in the flow of modern events. You may know the names of the past and present boysnet figures—now it’s time to learn some names who helped make those names possible.
Names like Rear Admiral Grace Hopper, a decorated high-ranking member of the United States Navy and the creator of the A0 Compiler and originator of the COBOL computer language. Or Elizabeth J. Feinler, a former director of the Network Information Center (NIC), the organization responsible for migrating the original government ARPANET to the system we now know as the public Internet. And Radia Perlman, who invented the STP, which allowed for the safe and fast connection of multiple computers on an ethernet network.
These names should be known as well as, in some cases more so, than the names of the men who comprise the founders and current vanguard of boysnet.
Without Grace Hopper’s work, how would the modern economy which produced Jobs, Wozniak, and Gates exist? Without Feinler’s system, how much longer would it have taken to create the initial roadmaps of the early web? Without Perlman, Berners-Lee wouldn’t have had the beginnings of a network to link computers inter-between.
From its time of conception, the Internet is often viewed as inextricably tied to masculine culture, and, more specifically, masculine effort. But just looking at its basic history casts a much different picture: in the early stages of the Internet, it was women who not just helped, but in many cases spearheaded, the foundations of what would become the greatest city the world has ever called home.
And the girls didn’t stop there.
From foundations to neighborhoods
Once pioneers carve out a place for themselves on the frontier, they begin the process of creating the places that will comprise their community. Town halls, plots of farmland, local shops, spaces to display or practice cultural works and traditions.
After the girls had set down the stones of the first streets and built the piping their community needed to run, they set to work creating these spaces.
A few of these are nothing more than old ruins—there’s not anything left except for a few scattered screenshots.
Places like Gurl.com, which at the turn of the millennium was an independent site built, run, and frequented by women who sought out community and culture that wasn’t heavily corporatized and urging them to buy buy buy.
The site, formatted as an online zine, was so popular it produced three best-selling books written by its creators, and its look was very much that of a homemade magazine passed around between a close friend group. When many resources for young women were painted in stereotypically feminine hues of light pinks, baby blues, soft yellows, Gurl.com was a black slate with old digital tiles of bold purples, deep reds, tough magentas. Its logo was a purple arm that ended in a fist, and graphics of wild faces, lips with chipped teeth, and eyes in hand mirrors peppered the site like stickers on an old bathroom stall. It was a place built by hand, not by committee. A little cove of homespun grit, open to anyone who needed a break from the blaring populist pink neon of market-driven feminine culture of the time.
Gurl.com is just one example of one site—many more were built across the girlsnet of the early web. Whole neighborhoods from all over the world, which needed some way to communicate and share with each other. So the girls figured out a way to do that too.
ChickClick.com is an example of one of the early web-ring portal sites. Designed and maintained by women, this was a late-90s gateway to, at one point, forty individually-built sites, forums, multi-user dungeons—early text-based open-world games—and a slew of other spaces across the girlsnet. The idea was to find a way to link together as many women-driven spaces as possible, to promote solidarity and foster open dialogue and the growth of culture.
Like Gurl.com, ChickClick.com had a similar early-web collage aesthetic. It featured all of its sister sites at the top in simple slices of links, and had various sections to show off stores, new articles, and highlights from chatrooms across the network. Cartoons of women, charming and crude, poke out from behind different areas of the site. The entire homepage felt like a comic strip clubhouse.
This portal, like many before it, now lays dormant, one of the infinite artifacts in the Internet Archive exhibit.
As any great civilization learns however, ruins don’t signify the death of a culture, but rather the passing on of its knowledge to future children. After all, the lowest parts of New York’s Manhattan are the oldest pieces of the city; and they have given birth to numerous cultural waves time and time again.
The same is true with girlsnet. Those old neighborhoods, filled with museum pieces, gave rise to something much, much bigger.
The Ages
If bricks are the common cornerstone of buildings, buildings are the common cornerstone of culture. Without spaces to first gather, people cannot meet. They cannot exchange ideas. They can’t make friends. They can’t organize.
Once they do, something unique begins to happen: they form a culture. If they frequent those spaces long enough, that culture will remain, even if the buildings do not.
The early girlsnet created places for women to gather, explore, and bond with one another. As the 2000s progressed, these spaces went dormant—but the cultures only grew.
Like any culture, you can separate those of girlsnet into ages, eras bookmarked by similar characteristics.
The Horizon City
As modern cities grow, the coral of their local neighborhoods gives rise to a new species: skyscrapers.
Contemporary skylines across the planet are dominated by glass and steel monoliths that cast shadows over smaller parts of the city. Often, these skyscrapers make up the Financial District of their given home, and they signal a notable change from the city as a communal center, to a corporate one.
The Internet has experienced a similar shift. It boasts a titanic Financial District—some reports estimate that in 2024, online transactions accounted for a value of $1.8 quadrillion. To put that in perspective, the Gross Domestic Product of all economies on planet Earth, our whole planetary salary, was $111.3 trillion in 2024. So the Internet, in transaction value alone, was worth about 9 Earths last year.
But the average Internet user does not spend a majority of their time sending payments back and forth in the Financial District of the internet—they spend it communicating with friends, family, and strangers via different platforms in the Social (Media) District. In fact, the 5.04 billion social media users all spend, on average, 36% of their time, every day, in the Social District.
For fun, let’s say the Internet is valued at $1.8 quadrillion every year. If social media use accounted for 36% of the time spent on the Internet, that means the rough dollar valuation of that time is $648 trillion. That’s about 5 ½ Earths worth of value.
Today’s world truly is an attention economy. Whatever demographic owns it— in both audience share and controlling stakes—holds the keys to the most lucrative central district in the largest city in human history.
Figure 1, found below, makes a strong case that women may be poised to seize those keys to the Social District.
Platform | Global Monthly Active Users (MAUs) | User Demographics | Creator Demographics | Source |
~ 47% women, ~ 53% men (global, 2024) | ~ 78% of influencers monetizing via Instagram are women | |||
TikTok | ~ 57% women, ~ 46% men (global, 2024) | ~ 53.8% female creators vs. 46.2% male | ||
~ 76% women, ~ 17% men (U.S., 2024) | N/A | |||
Webtoon (LINE) | ~ 64% of U.S. users are women | ~ 42% of creators are women (global) |
Percentages of Female vs. Male User/Creator populations on major social media platforms
If these numbers are indicative of anything, it’s that women are moving more and more to the digital skyscrapers at the heart of the Internet’s commercial center. What’s perhaps funny is that the places they used to call home, like LiveJournal, AO3, Gurl.com, and others, have historically taken a backseat to male-driven platforms like YouTube, Reddit, or even 4chan. Now, however, the tables are gradually turning, and when it comes to commerce and culture, women have a pole position that may just net them some of the greatest reserves of wealth and prestige available in the modern world.
That is, if the algorithms don’t get them first.
Turf wars no more
The climb from the old neighborhoods of independent zines to some of the highest boardrooms in the modern digital city is auspicious—but aggressive expansion brings conflict. Not just with individuals, but the intangible principalities which govern them.
Turf wars happen all the time on the Internet. Some of these spiral into full-on guerilla hot wars, on-and-off conflicts that can last for years.
Only one, however, successfully crossed the border from the Internet into reality on a grand scale. It leapt from some of the farthest parts of the fringe to the very heart of public conversation. Even now, the phantom of this conflict has been kept alive by powerful algorithms, and its lingering effects continue to commandeer global events to this day:
The conflict in question is Gamergate.
Some gates should stay closed
Gamergate was an infamous online event that occurred in 2014 involving a young woman who was an independent game developer, and her alleged relationships with game journalists. The ultimate accusation was that the woman had a personal relationship with journalists in order to get good reviews to boost her game’s popularity.
This event, while it began in a niche community, did not stay niche. It mutated into an unstoppable force that was so powerful it not only prompted a civil war between niche communities of all kinds and their institutions—it spilled over into real-world news and politics.
Many figures who populate modern day pop-culture politics benefited from the division Gamergate created between the left and the right in American politics. People like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, Alex Jones, Joe Rogan, Milo Yiannopoulos, Dave Rubin, Steven Crowder, Charlie Kirk, and a glut of other online commentators all saw huge spikes in popularity as they capitalized attitudes either created by or related to Gamergate.
Some have been so bold to say that the rise of political figures like Donald Trump is the direct result of Gamergate, especially given how much his initial victory in 2016 was propelled by users on websites like 4chan, who used him as memetic revenge against their opponents in the Gamergate conflict. Their election of Donald Trump was something of a Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a blow to not just one particular institution, but all institutions they believed culpable in the scandal.
With this possible relationship, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the past decade of world events, as shaped by the turbulence in American politics, is in some way a result of a Gamergate ripple effect. An effect which girlsnet is both a subject of, and an active participant in.
Algorithms: Principalities of the Computer Soul
Gamergate was, in many ways, a backlash against girlsnet. Women were becoming more and more of a presence in online spaces that were traditionally masculine, and many men felt threatened or uneasy at the idea of sharing those spaces with them.
What was more, the social culture of the Internet was changing around that time as well. Imageboards and scattered forums, like 4chan or FYAD, or even older versions of Reddit, were being replaced by larger social media platforms, like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter. These newer platforms boasted far more equitable, or even slightly disproportionate, ratios of women to men. What’s obviously a bit funny is women have always existed on the Internet in these ratios, they just haven’t been as visible to the men who don’t leave their Internet bunkers and venture out beyond boysnet.
For some, it’s clear why Gamergate happened: terminally online men were terrified of having their existence threatened by the influx of women into the places they had claimed as “theirs”, and only “theirs”. So the moment they found a story with a woman who designed games, they sniffed out any possible relationships, and sunk their teeth in when they found “scandal”. The rest is history, and current events too.
There is, however, another way to look at the story.
Remember, the economy of the world is an attention economy. If you command attention, you command currency, and you command power. In a world like that, the only thing better to be than someone who gets attention, is someone who guides it.
The Well-Meaning Algorithm
It’s no secret that modern platform algorithms are designed to keep the user on as long as possible, by any means possible. That means content that sparks everything from joy to outrage is logged by a computer model, as is the user’s reaction to it. They can tell how long your eyes stay on something, how fast you click off of something, how many times you press like or unlike. These are all logged and used to build a psychological profile.
Famously, Spotify will build an advertiser profile based on your playlists, and sell that information to 3rd parties who use direct marketing on you based on when you’re listening to certain kinds of music. Are you about to go out? Better see an ad for energy drinks! Listening to cozy jazz in October? Why not mention an on-going deal at Starbucks?
These algorithms depend on constant emotional engines to keep them going. They draw on vast reserves of human psychology to pinpoint new possible industries.
While the older Internet could be chaotic and exacting, one of its charms was the relative absence of perfected, advanced algorithms. In earlier days, these most definitely existed, but they were not nearly as prevalent or targeted to users and their emotional or psychological states.
It was no coincidence that, in the mid-2010s, as the first major platforms tested new algorithms, an online conflict erupted that would become one of the most sensational stories in Internet history—and from it emerged a populist figure who has dominated headlines for over a decade, fueled by online personalities whose rise traces back to Gamergate.
The effects continue today. Just look at the cult-like markets around figures such as Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and Alex Jones—men who package lifestyle products and “alternative philosophies” alongside overt misogyny and far-right talking points. On the other side, prominent tradwife influencers like Estee Williams, and Hannah Neeleman promote not only wholesome imagery of home-cooked meals, simple pleasures, and child-rearing but also a rigid vision of gender roles aligned with reactionary politics. Together, these creators command audiences in the tens of millions.
For all that they say, post, and do, ultimately, what do their feeds contain more than anything else?
Advertisements.
If every emotion, every impulse, every identity, every possible idea, is no longer a point of action, but rather a repository of profit—how can fundamental structures ever be changed? There is no will to do so if both women and men, siloed by faceless machines, are nothing more than anodes and cathodes for each other. Ends of the same battery, constantly charged by different injections of ideology, whose conflict creates the energy that the algorithms feed on to survive.
It is truly a dystopian architecture, if one chooses to look at it that way. The days of Gurl.com, of classic tumblr, even the past couple years of TikTok, pale in comparison to a possible dawning future where nothing is changed, everything becomes more commodified, and all action is rendered inert by the very systems which promote it, for the sake of profit, which is regurgitated back to the people who inhabit those systems. An ouroboros of all social, psychological, technical, and maybe even spiritual energies. An infinite feed.
Onward, girlsnet!
Somewhere, out there, on the edge of the Internet, there is a life. Beyond the city.
It’s a humble life. It’s a simple life. There aren’t feeds. There are no impressive UI. There are no influencers. The algorithms, if any, are simple, and quiet.
It’s a life where regular people, enthusiasts, hobbyists, the lonely, the lost, the self-quarantined, the quiet, carve out their own place in the pixel soil. It’s a far cry from the current state of the Corporate Internet, where 15 companies control over 50% of the world’s monthly web visits. Fun fact as well: 3,000 sites, 0.07% of all total active domains are visited each year by the majority of Internet users.
This isn’t a call for girlsnet to abandon the citadel of modern social media. If anything, the current state of the modern Internet forecasts only abundance and a continued upward ascension for female and femme-driven culture.
But there is more to the Internet than those megasites. There is more to girlsnet than the skyscraper.
Out there, on those humble little websites, people are rediscovering what it really means. Not to use the Internet. But to be on the Internet.
And guess what?
One of the best resources out there on how to get started is a place built by a girl: sadgirl.online
Who wudda thunk?