[nostrademons]

Also the quality of hyperlinks has declined precipitously. Google's big insight was that what people say about a page matters more than what the page says itself. Hyperlinks were fundamental to the (pre-2013) ranking algorithm, in ways that were far more fundamental than just pagerank. This worked really well when people authored HTML pages by hand (or in FrontPage or DreamWeaver) and would promiscuously link out whenever another site was relevant.

It works really poorly when all the links are paid for, or bargained for, or part of social media sites that are overrun with spammers and use rel=nofollow anyway, or are internal-only because every site wants to be its own walled garden. That's the web we've got now.

[altdataseller]

As well as the fact fewer ppl are maintaining their own websites or blog. The content is now in places that cant be crawled as easily like Instagram, Tiktok and Twitter as well as FB groups.

[Wyoming23]

The loss of blogs is so huge in all sorts of ways.

Some random person's travel blog in 2008 would be full of genuinely useful information. That's gone now, replaced by regular people just posting pics to social media and then affiliate-link filled seo-optimized travel sites, half the time written by someone who hasn't even gone to the place but is just copying info and adding sponsored content.

The same is true for essentially everything- gardening, video games, books, bikes, bird watching, baking. The genuine amateur enthusiast content isn't published on the open web in accessible text. It's locked in walled gardens or just never created in the first place, with people choosing to post a couple pictures or videos rather than write a blog post about it.

[Brian_K_White]

I used to ridicule geocities and tripod, but I sure miss all those niche sites now.