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I'd say, subjectively, those sites got a spike out of the "mobile web revolution" starting when Safari on iPhones hit the scene around 2009 until maybe 2015 or

I'd say, subjectively, those sites got a spike out of the "mobile web revolution" starting when Safari on iPhones hit the scene around 2009 until maybe 2015 or so, but then struggled with ad network consolidation and targeted advertising (DoubleClick was bought by Google in 2007), and regular ad prices going down (marked by eg Dr Dobbs Journal ceasing publishing in 2014). We really should put up a web museum. For me, the best of times were in early 2000s after the dot-com bubble with clean sites and web design coming of it's own with Wikipedia, StackOverflow, Google (back then).

grzm 6y ago
Yeah, that tracks. It was kind of cool when people started being able to blog semi-professionally, paid for what they would do anyway. When people starting blogging to get paid, things did change. I’m surely oversimplifying, but the I haven’t enjoyed the web as much since. Now it’s pretty much just a reference tool, not a place for discovery and delight. Causation? Correlation? Tracks with the nostalgia, anyway :) (Are those kids on my lawn?)