You're thinking like a programmer. Learning HTML is not fun at all, for the vast majority of people.
It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are more ways to explain the varying quality of community sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains.
You're also assuming that everybody wants to get search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What if the whole point is to make pages about your pet cat, just because?
Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course this could fail utterly as the customers that Neocities wants probably don't distinguish between URLs and search queries.)
It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are more ways to explain the varying quality of community sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains.
You're also assuming that everybody wants to get search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What if the whole point is to make pages about your pet cat, just because?
Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course this could fail utterly as the customers that Neocities wants probably don't distinguish between URLs and search queries.)