[oblio]

> Yet, it's amazing how much information is freely available right now, given all the barriers that exist to host content.

While there are barriers, are you sure that's true? There's a million options to host content these days. It's much easier than 10 years and much, much easier than 20 years ago.

You can get a Wordpress blog or a Medium one with 2 clicks. You can make a Facebook account very easily. They might not be perfect, but the options are there.

[HelloNurse]

A Facebook account isn't even a useful platform for the aforementioned funny cat pics, let alone more important and more complex content.

Hosted blogs can be better in theory, but in practice only an expert can use them for complex applications: for example, indexing a collection of cute kitten photos by tags and multiple criteria isn't the same as posting kittens without metadata and offering readers only titles and generic post listings.

[morsch]

FWIW, you could get free webspace on Geocities and its contemporaries with 2 clicks, 20 years ago.

[Torwald]

Well, "2 clicks" is a bit of hyperbole, but in the spirit of your comment, yes, things improved even over that. The free hosting schemes available today are much more powerful. Just think about what you can do with a Google account. Docs, Drive, Blogger, Sites, Forms, Picasa & on & on & on