[frostiness]

Every now and then I see a post like this one that laments that the age of web pages looking unique is gone. Sure, I can agree with that, but it's hard to say that it wasn't a good tradeoff. The original article admits that it was able to decrease the barrier for entry for writing a blog by a LOT, and while it did make customization a lot less likely, it meant that people that were not going to write anything suddenly had the ability to.

I'm thinking primarily of sites like YouTube here. Sure, we all sacrificed the ability to customize the way that we serve videos to others, or the freedom of not being on a platform that someone else owns, but some of the best people on the site are people that aren't technically focused at all. These people would not have been able to publish anything if the barrier for entry wasn't lowered.

And on the opposite side, if you look at places trying to bring back the small/old web, you run into the issue that generally everyone there has the same interest of programming or technology, since it's borderline essential to get into these places in the first place. It's sometimes surprising what kind of people you find on there, but most of the time it's just a bunch of programmers. The freedom of the old web was brought back at the cost of the diversity of people that populated it.

[082349872349872]

We probably just differ in our tastes, but I'll argue that the decreased barrier was worthless, if not actively harmful.

Look at YouTube. The things I watch on there have 10s to 100s of people-hours behind them, compared to which wrangling HTML/WebRTC/whatever would not be very significant. All the thousands of blooming flowers who are just uploading raw phone captures? That I can, and by and large do, do without.

(the best counterexample I can think of ATM are "lyrics sung to a different tune", and while it's a bit nicer to get a performance than plaintext, it's not that much better)

Bonus track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nx-x_1lIXh4