I think there's even an argument. During the heyday of the "Read/write Web"/Web 2.0 which was supposedly in part about the mainstreaming of content creation, the reality was that relatively few people had blogs etc. (and there were far fewer podcasts in the first wave than today).
Is there less long-form thoughtful writing and personal websites today? Possibly. Certainly it's a much smaller part of the overall mix. But there's more content (both quality and otherwise) than ever.
Geocities and Tripod were prominent but they were a long way from being the only option.
And the hosting usually allowed CGI and PHP and often included shopping carts and other ready-made services. So it was ridiculously easy and cheap to set up a small business if you wanted to - or just create some basic pages if you didn't.
But take the average joe that doesn't know about these tools, they don't know about netlify, CSS or HTML for that matter. For them it's a whole lot easier to create an account.
Look, if 25 years ago 100k people had personal website and today 3m people have personal website and also 3 billion have social media accounts, are we worse off than we were then? The personal website concept isn’t dying. It’s just that it’s no longer the only kind of web presence an individual can have and others are more popular.
Also, are you really looking out for the average Joe here? Really? You think that same average Joe that’s currently reposting a two year old meme on his Facebook suddenly will have something worthwhile to say if it’s hosted on his own domain? You think crazy aunt Sue will go from screaming about chem trails to engaging in polite discourse just because she got off Twitter and registered a domain? You think uncle Buddy will do anything but make the background, logo, and font of his site based on the confederate flag because he can host it on BuddyMerican.com instead of on Facebook?
I believe we should all have the ability to have a website of our own with as little control lost as possible. And I believe just like it’s a lot easier today than it was 25 years to have a personal website, that it will be even easier 25 years from now. But when people reminisce about the good old days what they like is essentially that it was hard to have a personal website so only the smart people could do it. That isn’t to say that only smart people had websites, but that websites were primarily run by smart people and that was because you couldn’t buy one, you had to build it yourself. And that meant that when you found a personal website that it was likely of high quality. Is that how you feel today when you discover a random abandoned mom blog about how hard it is to decide between different types of formula?
What Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, et al did was that they made it super easy for the average Joe to have a pseudo-personal website. It’s your moniker on their platform, you generate content, they host it and make money. And people wanted it by the billions. But at the end of the day do you really believe that all their content would be better if they simply moved from one kind of public platform to another?
I am not talking only about teens influencers. Does a restaurant need a website, or a presence on Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app} is enough? I think the later. Sadly we have evolved into this.
It sucks that we depend on Facebook/Instagram and others to get information about a local business like a restaurant we want to visit.
But years ago if you wanted information about a restaurant on the web... was it even there? If they even had a website it was built by the owner's nephew or maybe used some wix template, then if it does exist you're going all over the place to find contact information, opening hours are probably missing, menu might be anything from another page to a download of a photographed PDF.
I like the fact that I can go to a social network profile and there's a big button with contact information in the same place for all businesses.
Yes, it was. ~10-20 years ago, local restaurants and businesses would pay high school / college kids a pittance set up a simple website for them. No online ordering, but they would usually have a menu, phone number, and hours.
The result was that the pages didn't all look like SquareSpace templates, and a lot of young people got their first leg up into a tech career.
It's almost an inversion - instead of many community sites, there are many users together on a smaller number of community groups, which are generally built on social platforms such as reddit and Facebook which make it easy to create them. It's not necessarily a bad thing, except that the most invested people in the communities don't have ownership of the platform or the data, so the communities that matter to them are vulnerable to any arbitrary changes in what the platform owners choose to do.
I frequent Youtube a ton and I noticed there are distinct communities on there like "Car Youtube" or "Gaming Youtube", hell there's entire communities built up around busting scammers on Instagram (those guys posting with stack of cash and a Lambo).
You start watching one channel and realize these guys do colabs with others in that space. Just a few months ago 3-4 Car Youtubers I watch got together and created "CarTrek" which is like a full blown TopGear esque car show.
I don't trust the platforms you cited, so when I want to call a restaurant and they want my business, they must have a website.
Besides, I don't want a third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.
If I am considering patronizing an unfamiliar restaurant, and my only source of information about it is some untrustworthy third party platform, I'm moving on. Like I said, many restaurants exist, I'm losing nothing by going somewhere trustworthy.
And again, I cannot emphasize this enough: I do not want some third party asserting itself into my relationship with the restaurant.
Neutral carriers and infrastructure providers have shown decades of tolerable neutrality [0], and are obviously a much different (and lower) threat model for contacting restaurants than the "Instagram/Facebook/{delivery app}" third party platforms to which I referred. These platforms have proven, year after year, to perform despicable acts of surveillance and experiments in psychological manipulation. They're called out for it, and they sometimes apologize and promise to "do better" in the future. Then they immediately go back to performing their creepy shit without remorse, and the cycle repeats.
"Fool me once..."
[0] Carriers and infrastructure providers certainly have unacceptable problems selling data+metadata to third party platforms, and I also note with righteous fury their enabling of illegal, unethical, and creepy-as-fuck government wiretapping and eavesdropping. They do not, for example, intercept my orders by showing some phone number other than the restaurant's. They don't disguise their call center as a restaurant's phone line. Their creepy psychological profile on me is less granular.
Someone might claim, "Oh, but Facebook has never done anything like that." Neither did Yelp or GrubHub or the others, until they did. These platforms have shown, over and over, they cannot be trusted. I'm not going to trust these middlemen. I can have a relationship directly with my food providers, and it benefits the provider and me, without worry that some asshole will someday decide they will manipulate me or the restaurant, simply because they possess that dubious ability.
It's like selling a product on marketplaces: inevitably, that fateful day comes when the platform decides to change the rules – against your best commercial interests – and the only two options you have are: stay, keep your head down and obey... or leave and start almost from scratch.
until they get kicked off
Whatever nice things one can say about platforms (and there are many) people are going to get kicked off. Of course the majority of the time they did something that was not allowed. No one can be mr perfect 24/7 365 days of the year, the rules can be totally idiotic too of course, at the scale the big platforms work false positives are [sadly] impossible to avoid.
But it doesn't matter. The platforms have to do house keeping, its unavoidable. If one deserved to get kicked off is entirely besides the point: It is not your website, you are a guest.
Your own website is an entirely different story. You have to break actual laws and you may deserve your day in court.
Compared to the cyborg-kangaroo court this is the superior deal. You can down vote me all day long, I have not broken any laws. You cant persecute and silence me for stating the obvious. On HN however this is how things work, you feel the statement lacks effort, is off topic or whatever other reason you can think of and then people get silenced.
I sure as hell hope HN doesn't implement an internet kangaroo court room (like wikipedia has, woah the walls of text generated by tiny issues!) but you can expect people not to speak their mind, not share their version of the story, to attempt to live up to your expectations and learn to survive your judgement.
This is why you need your own website.
Promotion is up to you no matter where you place your work.
An optimist would look at that and think how great it is that they are one click away from their competitors.
The two big problems with modern social media silos is that
1. content is ephemeral and that older content is not easy – or possible – to find.
2. they optimise for content that will push emotional buttons to drive “engagement” so they can sell viewers to advertisers
MySpace might have been a visual mess but I found it useful for finding out about a band or musician and listening to sample music (all without having to create an account on the platform). I came across all sorts of interesting niche content and communities on blogs, LiveJournal and web forums. These sites were all a lot more open; in most cases, you could easily view the content without having to have an account. If you liked a community and wanted to contribute you could create an account without having to worry about the site owners tracking you across the Internet.
You're right about Social networks etc. They ate bloggers' lunch.
Far too many people aren't prepared to teach themselves how things work these days and do things for themselves.
One of the greatest regrets I have as a webdev/designer was to give in to constant requests to make things 'fool-proof' in the name of growth.
Users never 'learned' anything. Like how to follow instructions or use a new UI/UX. Everything got dumbed-down.
Now look where we are on those networks. It's mostly an absolute mess of utter drivel. 'posted' (not created) by those 'fools'.
A clear road beyond will also take down the walls around the silos since effort to control the user would come at a price (force them off the platform(s) faster)
We could perhaps start by separating the API from presentation? Have A scalable chunk of FOSS at first hosted by a megacorp but easily moved some place else and A presentation platform where people build their gui that is as easily moved.
(Just thinking out loud, didn't put much thought in it.)
edit: your own domain should be an obvious ingredient. Which seems to suggest that domains should be free?
Oh sure YouTube is full of great content but most is motivated by income generation through ads and patrons.
The project could be backed up somewhere transparently, but the key thing would be that it wouldn't be tied to any one provider. If DO were to delete your content, you could just pick a different one.
It would be interesting to see an analysis of the pros and cons of whatever you are describing versus a traditional dynamic site with SQL backend.