Melatonin , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

That’s not right and I’ll tell you why. You’re not wrong about geocities opening up the ability to create websites to a lot more users. Geocities and other website creator sites like that were great, and did exactly that. Even MySpace did the same thing. But then here’s where corporations threw the control element in.

They added a social element. They took away a bare website presence, maybe a counter to see how many people came by, and replaced it with an upvote and downvote system where your thoughts were subject to peer pressure and social correction. MySpace, Geocities, all of those independent free website creator tools died in favor of Facebook, digg, Reddit, Twitter. The odd stuff, the weird stuff, the truly countercultural stuff, disappeared under the tyranny of the masses. People turned to blogs for a while. But soon those died too.

So now we have the new element of control. The control of what you get to see. What the web search engine shows you. What rises to the top of your feed. Hell a lot of the times you have to really work hard to find your own friend’s posts. I’m looking at you Instagram.

But by all means disagree with me. But you won’t convince me that this is better. Not in a million years.