[stackghost]

>An alternate framing for these types of "the old web was better" articles is: "I really liked the web better when only privileged, highly educated people could put up content". The reality is that there was a lot of implicit gatekeeping going on in the early web because of the technical hurdles.

First of all, there wasn't much in the way of technical hurdles when it came to myspace or geocities, so I don't buy your premise at all. I was LARPing as a video game reviewer at 10 years old in 1995 with my awful <blink> tags/tiled backgrounds/table layouts. I was a dumb kid and still managed to figure it out. So did approximately one squillion of other people.

Secondly, the same tired, obnoxious comment about privilege and technology can be trotted out and applied to the early web, early facebook, early usenet, early IRC, early LLMs, early crypto. What does this comment do to advance the discussion in any meaningful way?