It takes some digging to agree with the headline, but it feels true at some level. Clearly it is the walled social media gardens that really "broke the web" an

It takes some digging to agree with the headline, but it feels true at some level. Clearly it is the walled social media gardens that really "broke the web" and in far more fundamental ways (as in: posts that are schematic (e.g. 140 chars), that are not accessible unless logged in, where discovery is platform/algorithmic driven and not user driven etc). These platforms flurished because they made it very easy for people to participate. In the (hypothetical) absence of social media, blogs could be accused of making it (merely) easy to follow a particular pattern of content creation. This is a little bit like accusing writers or composers of blindly following a genre instead of crafting their own. Yes all genres are inventions and it is important not to stiffle that creative process, but it is not reasonable to expect the majority to do that...