I'm not sure if there was ever a purest form or that we'll ever agree on what it was. Pre-Web? Pre-smartphone? But smartphones drove a huge push towards centra

I'm not sure if there was ever a purest form or that we'll ever agree on what it was. Pre-Web? Pre-smartphone? But smartphones drove a huge push towards centralization. Ten years ago, when the Internet was mostly on desktops and laptops, you might have a few sites you regularly visited and would pop open in different browser tabs when you sat down at your computer. Once smartphones became dominant, people started spending a lot more time on a handful of big sites and apps: Facebook, Twitter and friends. It's harder to build a site that works reasonably well on smartphones than on desktops, so companies with big IT budgets to develop a nice cross-device UI suddenly had a huge leg up on attracting visitors and getting them to come back. It's also harder to type on a phone, which meant people spent less time searching and typing in memorized URLs and more time scrolling through newsfeeds.