a little bit of a harsh intro but it'll do. carrd does kinda suck. despite initially being a service offering a simple way for businesses to create sites for their services, it became popular with ordinary netizens who love to overshare online. it became a replacement for about me pages and biographies.
i recently read an article on someone's neocities site (which, regrettably, i forgot the name of) about carrd and i had some thoughts about the service. again, carrd is a service for businesses. for people who have services to offer. for people who have products to sell. and yet it's being used by people on twitter who want an extended biography. how? how does this happen? how does a web hosting service for professionals become popular with such a userbase?
it's simple. carrd is easy to use. just drag and drop your elements into the empty space, add some text, maybe an image or two, and voilà! you now have a simple site, and you didn't even have to write any code. but what if i told you that you could do more for the small price of 50 dollars a year? you heard me right -- fifty united states dollars per year. now, of course, carrd does offer more restricted variants of their pro package for 10 and 20 dollars, but if you want a more complete site, you're gonna have to get their biggest tier. but why would you pay for basic website features like custom CSS and a favicon when you can create a neocities site and learn HTML & CSS in 3-4 hours?
because it's time consuming. of course you'd rather spend half an hour dragging and dropping elements and adjusting colours -- but with the free tier, you're only limited to a couple layouts. have you noticed that almost every carrd looks the same? many of them look like file explorers, consist of various boxes, have cute anime girls (or boys) on most of the pages, have "next" and "previous" links that take you to different sections of their sites in which you find out what their kins are before you find out that you're on their DNI criteria. some of them have such small text that you're gonna give yourself lumbar hyperlordosis just leaning toward your monitor trying to read it. don't get me started on the ones with flashing, seizure-inducing backgrounds (and i am not exaggerating when i say "seizure-inducing") -- without warnings, mind you. it's almost always the webcore/scenecore/???core ones, by the way.
you know what i think is worse than carrd itself? its userbase. it's mostly twitter users who a) are fed up with twitter's character limit, b) don't want to spend hours learning how to code a proper web site, b2) don't have access to a computer on which they could code a proper web site, and c) want an extended biography that is simple and easy to craft. unfortunately along with this came the phenomenon of throwing internet safety out the window, shattering it entirely. people will list their age, their assigned gender at birth, their race, their entire medical history, many of them in excruciating detail. essentially, they are putting themselves at risk of getting doxxed.
what's worse, though, is how inaccessible some of these carrds can be. never mind the seizure-inducing gifs they use as a background, or the tiny font that you have to break your back to read. sometimes the colour palette is legitimately eye-straining. i've personally had numerous headaches, migraines, even, from trying to read light gray text on a solid white background on someone's carrd. some of the colour palettes are absolutely atrocious. how the hell am i supposed to read white text on a pastel pink background? pair this with terrible font choices and you've got yourself an unreadable carrd, great job. tiny navigation buttons, wonky fonts, neon or pastel colours, flashing gifs, text that doesn't contrast against the background...i could go on. why the fuck was this allowed?
due to carrd's restrictive nature, many users have migrated to neocities. sounds good, doesn't it? but, ah, there's one slight problem with this -- since carrd is usually a person's first experience with making a web site (in this day and age, anyway), people have created sites on neocities that could've just as well been made with carrd. we've come full circle. i mean, yes, now at least they have more freedom to do what they'd like, but why the fuck wouldn't you want to exercise that freedom and use it to its absolute fullest? you learned to code, and for what? so you could make a site with the same boring layout that you can make on carrd? you have the power of HTML and CSS at your disposal AND YOU'RE NOT FUCKING USING IT!
i'd venture to argue that carrd has massively contributed to a lack of original web sites on the internet. there is a clear lack of passion and creativity behind the neocities sites that i'm talking about. maybe it's just me, but i don't know why one would copy the source code of their carrd and host it on neocities. it seems pointless. yeah, i mean, at least you don't have to pay to use CSS, but even then, aside from essentially getting real close to doxxing yourself, what purpose does your site have? no, seriously. i think i'm going to have to write a whole separate post about this because i do have a lot to say about this particular topic, so i will spare you the details for now, you're welcome (i guess). my point is, you're probably better off just making a carrd.
this isn't to say that you should avoid using carrd entirely. aside from the abysmal bullshit pricing plans, the platform itself isn't to blame for most of the issues i've discussed. many of carrd's issues fall on the users themselves. if you can avoid oversharing and the other various problems that can render a carrd unreadable, do feel free to make a carrd. otherwise, just learn basic HTML and CSS and host a site on neocities instead.