I think the author ignores another reason that people (especially us techies) don't like to admit: The majority of people don't care about following a list of personal websites. Instead, websurfers just get whatever snippets of information they want (e.g. food recipe, medical trivia) from whatever website happens to have it and then move on.

The disinterest in personal websites comes from both the websurfers and many content authors themselves.

Some examples from the content creators...

Clay Shirky's essay "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" happens to be on the HN front page right now. But he doesn't maintain his personal website anymore. He gave reasons for it[1] and even said he regrets letting it rot. But even today, his personal website remains empty and previous links all return 404 errors. But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cshirky

John Carmack's old personal website "altdevblogaday.com" is gone now.[2] But he does stay active on Twitter: https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack

Those 2 guys are obviously internet-savvy and need no lectures on personal websites -- and yet they chose to abandon them.

As to examples for websurfers, if you ask normal people if they sometimes search the internet for a cooking recipe, they'll say "yes". But if then followup with "Can you name a cooking website you got a recipe from?", most will say "no". The average websurfer cared more about the recipe and not the particular website. Sure, some will make a mental note of the domain url and maybe even bookmark it but many won't.

The lack of interest for following "little websites" continues to be reinforced with tools like ChatGPT. Most people would rather get some synthesized information instead of visiting a bunch of different websites they don't care about.

I think this past comment about RSS not being relevant to regular people is uncomfortable for some to read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2060707

I bought this internet yellow pages book in 1995 when the consumer-accessible internet was new: https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Internet+Yellow+Pages+1s...

That book represents a different time when indie websites were a purposeful destination to visit. I notice that a lot of people don't bother doing that anymore. Me included.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31041194

[2] requires Wayback Machine: http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2012/04/26/functional-programm...