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The last sentence can’t be true. If you go looking for them, they’re easy to find. The problem is you don’t.

Sort of. There are many confounding factors here. For one, they're harder to find because the number of personal websites doesn't scale as quickly as commercial content and SEO spam. It's also a bit of a vicious cycle, because if your website is less likely to be read by anyone, why bother writing it in the first place?

But for the most part, the very people bemoaning the current state of affairs then go back to scrolling through TikTok / Instagram / Facebook / Reddit.

Or, when you do go looking, it doesn’t feel the same. Why?

Because you were 25 years younger. When you are, say, 20 years old, people >= 20 years old are likely to be interesting, which was pretty much everyone with a web page. When you are 45 years old, writings from 20 year olds are much less interesting, on average.

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