To me, it's clear that discoverability is the problem with the open web. People are not willing to sink time and effort into creating something unless they hav

To me, it's clear that discoverability is the problem with the open web. People are not willing to sink time and effort into creating something unless they have some assurance that they are going to get an audience. From a raw mechanics standpoint, it's relatively straightforward to put some content up on the Internet and give it a URL. But nobody will ever see it. That is why people put everything they do on some sort of site with discoverability. Streamers stream content on Twitch, because it has that sidebar with people playing the same game and your stream could show up there, and people might click it. People upload videos to YouTube because YouTube will figure out what kind of video it is and recommend it to people interested in that type of video. People post to Facebook and Twitter because their friends can retweet it and spread it around their sphere of influence. People upload their apps to the app store because that's where people go for apps. (This is not new. People that create physical products certainly want to have their product on store shelves, so that people can randomly discover it.) I think, honestly, Google cancelling Google Reader is what killed the open web. Google Reader made it easy for anyone to become a mini Facebook. If someone liked your writing, you were pretty much assured that they would be back when you wrote your next post. Google Reader gave them an app in which to random discover your next blog post, and there was enough stuff other than you in there to get people into the habit of checking for "something" every day (and that something was occasionally you). But, it is a little unfair to say that's what killed it. What killed it was a "better way". Social media pretty much guarantees that someone will see and engage with your work, and that's what motivates people to do work. If you can bring that to the open web, you'll kill Facebook and Twitter overnight. Good luck. (There are other things that contributed. One thing that bugs me in particular is Reddit's unwritten rule of not being allowed to submit your own work. Of course, there is too much spam when people submit their own stuff -- people are too emotionally invested in their creation to notice that it's bad or off-topic -- but it basically forces someone else to be the discoverability method. You have to post it to Twitter and hope that someone picks it up and puts it on Reddit. Or you have to build your audience some other way and make your own subreddit that people opt into. That sort of thing is helping social media and hurting the traditional link aggregator. HN does a much better job, but HN has the benefit of being relatively small, focused, and having professional moderation.)