> What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who we

> What the author fails to consider is that this diminished position has nothing to do with the tools, and everything to do with the population of people who were coming online in the early 2000s. I think it does have something to do with the tools, but not in the way the author is describing. Rather, the need for personal homepages was diminished because search engines replaced them! When I came online, around that time, I was introduced right away to search engines as the way to find things online. This of course was always an incomplete replacement. Search engines provided a window into a much larger set of content than any one curated website, but they were more easily manipulated, so smaller and more niche content would be comparatively harder to discover. The popular sites, and the sites whose ranking was manipulated, rose to the top. I've started to wonder lately if it would be beneficial to revive personal, curated homepages for this reason. They can't replace search engines entirely of course, but the breadth of information you can discover on rabbit holes from older sites is mind-boggling and I feel like there's something there.