Eh, static site generators, CMSes, and bloghosts didn't break the web. Sure, they made it easier for people to churn out content, but it was authentic material they cared enough to write about. Whether they posted under their real name, or under a screenname, they built little fiefdoms of content with their personal time, and made it available for anyone to read, without an account, and without any obligation of feedback.
What changed was when people began putting their content into siloes protected by a login wall, and platforms strongly defined by visible indicators of popularity, which didn't really happen until Facebook and Twitter.
Even in the Livejournal and Myspace days, a lot of profiles were public, but quasi-pseudonymous, requiring some effort to actually find. It was Facebook that mandatorily juxtaposed one's real name with one's real words, which quickly led to predictable outcomes: people being doxxed, harrassed, turned down for employment. Within a few years, most people set their profiles to private in an effort to protect themselves from snooping employers, colleges, exes, and trolls, keeping most of what people write and share walled off behind a login and a friend approval gate.
Twitter was billed as "microblogging", where one could publish short snippets with more frequency vs. a long-form blog, but its bizarre interface, unclear direction, and feature competition with Facebook caused it to evolve many of the same mechanisms and signals of popularity as Facebook. Facebook's status updates were a direct assault on Twitter, so Twitter eventually morphed 'favorites' into 'likes'. With it, it was blindingly obvious that most people's content wasn't even being read.
All of this social transition took place in the shadow of the commercialization of the web, where websites were no longer just billboards for businesses, but platforms where one could conduct commerce, consume professional content, and be subject to behavioral analytics that fed back into ads. With the abundance of commercial content, consumption went up and amateur production went down.
Yeah, the article is stupid nostalgia. What killed the web is very clear: a select cadre of companies conspired and worked very hard to turn the web into an advertising platform. The developments here are obvious:
1. Google Ads monetized linking and gave birth to the SEO "industry."
2. Facebook mandated real names.
3. Apple and Google completely closed off their mobile platforms requiring pre-approval for all applications.
The last piece of this is that the stewards of the web, the W3C, have completely abandoned their charge and sold the web out to these corporations. The W3C has allowed the evolution of the web to be completely captured by Google and other major corporations. Rather than making the web simpler and more accessible we've seen the W3C bless standard after standard that make the web significantly more complicated. Today nobody but extremely wealthy corporations can afford to develop a browser. HTTP2 means nobody but major corporations can write web servers these days. Abandoning a well-structured web (XML, semantic technologies) for the current html5-js-soup means that the knowledge published on the web is wholly inaccessible... unless it gets exposed via proprietary, one-off json-soup APIs.
The complete corporate capture of the web wasn't driven by "blogging" nor was it in any way a democratic process. It was a deliberate and carefully engineered process that created a web and a computing platform (mobile phones) that is absolutely and completely under the control of corporations, moreso than any previous platform.
At this point there's really only two ways forwards: (1) abandon the web and start over or (2) governments will step up and reign in corporations.
What changed was when people began putting their content into siloes protected by a login wall, and platforms strongly defined by visible indicators of popularity, which didn't really happen until Facebook and Twitter.
Even in the Livejournal and Myspace days, a lot of profiles were public, but quasi-pseudonymous, requiring some effort to actually find. It was Facebook that mandatorily juxtaposed one's real name with one's real words, which quickly led to predictable outcomes: people being doxxed, harrassed, turned down for employment. Within a few years, most people set their profiles to private in an effort to protect themselves from snooping employers, colleges, exes, and trolls, keeping most of what people write and share walled off behind a login and a friend approval gate.
Twitter was billed as "microblogging", where one could publish short snippets with more frequency vs. a long-form blog, but its bizarre interface, unclear direction, and feature competition with Facebook caused it to evolve many of the same mechanisms and signals of popularity as Facebook. Facebook's status updates were a direct assault on Twitter, so Twitter eventually morphed 'favorites' into 'likes'. With it, it was blindingly obvious that most people's content wasn't even being read.
All of this social transition took place in the shadow of the commercialization of the web, where websites were no longer just billboards for businesses, but platforms where one could conduct commerce, consume professional content, and be subject to behavioral analytics that fed back into ads. With the abundance of commercial content, consumption went up and amateur production went down.