As we are embarking on some beautiful philosophy on this thread, I feel inclined to try to contribute. It's definitely the homogenization and corporatization,

As we are embarking on some beautiful philosophy on this thread, I feel inclined to try to contribute. It's definitely the homogenization and corporatization, and the ads and paywalls, tracking and privacy issues, etc. Perhaps this is nostalgia, but, exploring isn't the same as it used to be. I was 8 in 2003 and I remember surfing the wild west web of fan sites for my favorite shows and games. Pokemon probably had the most. A lot of people's sites were really intricate and organized and had a lot of content. I fondly remember a few sites with content created by just their owner. When people had their own personal websites and didn't worry about copyright strikes and ads, when you didn't have to sign in, people were more creative. A lot of these kids would experiment with different types of art. Those personal fan sites often included art, fan fiction, flash cartoons, and journals. I liked all the different site layouts. Now everything is a cookies message and a hamburger menu. Later on places like deviantart came and swallowed most of those creative people by the time I was 13 or so, old enough to really contribute something. Deviantart is a great example of a website filled with beautiful art (and even more garbage), connected to dead accounts, that may be purged or broken when sitewide changes occur, and forever forgotten. Maybe they wouldn't be preserved at all if a personal site went down, but I feel like placing everything within the bounds of an unreadable terms of service, held by an uncaring corporation, on a site with some customization if you feel like paying for it, is a bigger problem depending on who you are. When everyone had their own, it felt more spread out, you didn't have to join one big community to talk to a group or an individual, you just... clicked a mailto link. Maybe it's a convenience thing, in that case, not every artsy person also wants to be their own webmaster. But alternately, those who do create personal sites or project sites are forced to market themselves as there's less "exploration", people don't "discover" as easy. Perhaps I'm unusual but, as a kid, I used to put vague terms into Google and surf to the 20th or 30th page and find all the neat stuff I could. My disk was stuffed with gifs and sprites and little games. Remember back in like '02 when FunnyJunk was the same colors as HN? (iirc) wfh today, probably shouldn't be writing books like this.