I didn't make any claims about the things you are talking about, only that it was more fun. Which it was. It's boring now. I used to go poke around, following random links just to see what was out there, encountering all kinds of oddball pages which represented nothing more than some person's individual gift to the world, and it was fascinating. It was fun to watch it all grow. I felt motivated to contribute, to share my own pages full of whatever information or opinions I happened to have. Photos of interesting places, stories about cities I'd visited, didn't matter; it all seemed like it was worth sharing, because that's what the web basically was.

I don't find that anymore. Homepages came and went, blogs came and went, and if there's still a thriving web out there beyond the big commercial sites, I don't know where to look to find it.

I still have my personal site, and I still post on my blog occasionally, but it increasingly feels like calling into the wind. I'm not going to just switch over and post all the same stuff on some big commercial site; fuck that. The web was awesome when it looked like it was going to be a new way for humanity to talk to itself; now it seems like little more than another way for rich people to make money. It does that very impressively, but who cares? Rich people always had ways to make money and will always find more; it's not very exciting when they turn yet another collaborative community project into a profit center.