The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much harder.

The article mentions the rise of smart phones as a factor but fails to grasp the real reason for their impact. Smart phones made making web pages much harder. Before Smart Phones a user could slap together some HTML and perhaps some simple CSS with underconstruction.gif and have an OK looking page. That same page would look terrible on a cell phone because the simple table-based layouts that people could understand do not render well on small screens. Sure they could rewrite the site but that was a lot of effort. Plus HTML was very much a moving target back then. Much easier to move your "I like potatoes" or whatever page to Facebook, which takes care of everything for you and provides a nice network effect. If we want the weird web back then we are going to have to provide tools to make websites look good on all screens while still being expressive enough that a child can pick them up but also provide the kind of instant feedback of Facebook likes and comments. Perhaps Indyweb or Mastodon will be the key but right now they are still to complex for random-j-blogger to deal with.