Yeah, the article is stupid nostalgia. What killed the web is very clear: a select cadre of companies conspired and worked very hard to turn the web into an adv

Yeah, the article is stupid nostalgia. What killed the web is very clear: a select cadre of companies conspired and worked very hard to turn the web into an advertising platform. The developments here are obvious: 1. Google Ads monetized linking and gave birth to the SEO "industry." 2. Facebook mandated real names. 3. Apple and Google completely closed off their mobile platforms requiring pre-approval for all applications. The last piece of this is that the stewards of the web, the W3C, have completely abandoned their charge and sold the web out to these corporations. The W3C has allowed the evolution of the web to be completely captured by Google and other major corporations. Rather than making the web simpler and more accessible we've seen the W3C bless standard after standard that make the web significantly more complicated. Today nobody but extremely wealthy corporations can afford to develop a browser. HTTP2 means nobody but major corporations can write web servers these days. Abandoning a well-structured web (XML, semantic technologies) for the current html5-js-soup means that the knowledge published on the web is wholly inaccessible... unless it gets exposed via proprietary, one-off json-soup APIs. The complete corporate capture of the web wasn't driven by "blogging" nor was it in any way a democratic process. It was a deliberate and carefully engineered process that created a web and a computing platform (mobile phones) that is absolutely and completely under the control of corporations, moreso than any previous platform. At this point there's really only two ways forwards: (1) abandon the web and start over or (2) governments will step up and reign in corporations.