I don’t think it’s how we build websites per se, I think it has to do with how just a few websites have made themselves so phenomenally useful that they’ve elim

I don’t think it’s how we build websites per se, I think it has to do with how just a few websites have made themselves so phenomenally useful that they’ve eliminated the need for what I’ll call the “discoverabilty infrastructure” we used to have. The first is Google. Google was such a phenomenally good search engine that you rarely needed to “surf” the web to accomplish a task. You could search “order a hand powered woodworking drill” and likely be taken to a page that let you do just that. Much of the discoverability of “fun, weird” stuff came from the “surfing” aspect of the web, Google vastly reduced that. The second is Wikipedia (and the Wikia networks). Much of the wonderful weirdness of the early web was passionate amateurs compiling information, wrapped in their own design aesthetic (or lack thirst of.). Wikipedia as amazing and wonderful as it is, gets rid of the need to find these sites to answer a question about the world (again, reducing surfing behavior, at least outside of Wikipedia.) The last is Facebook. So much of geo cities and the early web was the “personal website”- a Sort of combination of Facebook profile, blog, and experiment in web art. These sometimes grew into impressive little gems of content, but mostly they were terrible quips and “under construction” banners. Then came the Friendster->MySpace-> Facebook and LinkedIn transition, and the need for these personal sites dropped away. They still exist, but the interaction patterns for using fbook and LinkedIn are so much easier. I feel like YouTube still has the early web experience to it. Much of the content remains the domain of passionate amateurs and the “up next” algorithm regularly takes me in serendipitous locations (and sometimes down some darker paths). The fun and weird communities now seem like “islands in the net” if you will, they are there and probably larger than ever, but much harder to get to (or at least stumble upon), due to tooling that allows use to accomplish tasks without detours.