> personal websites still exist, there are just fewer of them
And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet.
It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days.
I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's personal experience, obviously there exists a population that moved away from hand-crafted HTML to blogs and social media, but that movement is trivial compared innumerable, inconceivable, content dilution of the net that happened over the course of the 2000s.
Most people on social media would never have created those hand-crafted sites to begin with, they weren't members of that self-selected group of early web pioneers. They were only ever going to engage with easy to use systems. We didn't miss out on a similarly sized web of artisanal websites, that future was never in the cards.
Yeah people forget that we went from an internet where ANYTHING you wanted, if it was there, would be on a university site or some personal site by someone slightly obsessed with the topic (otherwise why would they have build a website about it by hand or in Dreamweaver and bothers to host it?) - Wikipedia didn’t exist so even relatively simple searches would bring up these little almost “fan” sites.
This was the era of massive FAQ posts that were just becoming webpages in some cars - an example being the Doom FAQ: that would never be written as a single document today. (Even the modern linked copies are “new”: https://www.gamers.org/docs/FAQ/doomfaq/index.html ).
A game like Factorio or Dwarf Fortress certainly has similar or greater depth; but a single massive ascii text file will never be written for them, as there are more modern ways to transmit the information
It doesn't matter that there are objectively more if one sees them more rarely.
Like the saying goes, if it isn't on Google it doesn't exist. I use Kagi full time and I am delighted when an old style website is listed in the top 5. I always think "this would never appear in modern Google."
There are absolutely more, but relatively fewer, and you come across them less. They stopped being a well-known role model for how to put content out on the web.
And my point is that this isn't true. There are more weird, wonderful, random single-purpose and eclectic websites today than ever before in the history of the Internet.
It's just that they are suspended in an ocean of so much more Internet than existed before that they feel absent compared to the halcyon days.
I'm not trying to invalidate anyone's personal experience, obviously there exists a population that moved away from hand-crafted HTML to blogs and social media, but that movement is trivial compared innumerable, inconceivable, content dilution of the net that happened over the course of the 2000s.
Most people on social media would never have created those hand-crafted sites to begin with, they weren't members of that self-selected group of early web pioneers. They were only ever going to engage with easy to use systems. We didn't miss out on a similarly sized web of artisanal websites, that future was never in the cards.