Where have all the websites gone?

Ryan Broderick recently wrote something like “the internet is just three and a half websites now,” but the internet is so broken that neither of us could find the post where he wrote it.

The pleasant parts of the internet seemed to be curated by human beings, not algorithms.

In her essay,

A Vernacular Web

(2005), Olia Lialina describes the web of the mid-1990s as:

bright, rich, personal, slow and under construction. It was a web of sudden connections and personal links. Pages were built on the edge of tomorrow, full of hope for a faster connection and a more powerful computer... it was a web of amateurs soon to be washe

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Whenever you stumble upon an interesting thought on another site, write about it and link to it. Not only is it respectful to link to the person you quoted, but hyperlinks are also the magic force holding the Web together. They are both helpful and powerful. You can also add a links section to your site, where you collect interesting links you foun... See more

Still, I think something more fundamental has been lost for all of us as social media has evolved. It’s harder to find the spark of discovery, or the sense that the Web offers an alternate world of possibilities. Instead of each forging our own idiosyncratic paths online, we are caught in the grooves that a few giant companies have carved for us al... See more