GeoCities offered free hosting which was supported by advertisements. In my experience, the service was pretty dismal as well. Also, it seemed to me that there were many fake and/or useless sites hosted on GeoCities.
I won't miss you, but I'm sure there are many who will. There are still many sites that offer free or incredibly cheap hosting with and without ads, but I've always found them more of a hassle and headache than anything else.
Its hard to believe that Yahoo purchased this company for three billion dollars in stock, and is now planning to shut it down.
What is next for Yahoo? Are they planning to focus again on search, or are they going to continue trying to generate their own content?