> Moreover, websites and blogs are still around, and just as populated as they ever were. It's just that there's a bigger population on social media sites.
This is absolutely true, but it's also true to say that they're very hard to find nowadays. You can in part blame the dominance of the major platforms, but I think the real culprit is probably SEO: it's very hard to out-SEO anybody with a marketing budget, or the kind of bottom feeders who are willing to spew out spun or other low-quality content that spams search results.
There's a bitter irony in realising that, back in the day, I used to bemoan the first page of search results being cluttered with "junk" from GeoCities or wherever, when I was looking for "real", "authoritative" information, whereas now I'd be much more welcoming of that kind of content appearing on page 1 of the search results.
And maybe that gets to the truth of it: good, interesting, worthwhile content has always been pretty hard to find online. You had to work for it 20 years ago, and you still have to work for it now.
I was deeping through the old web recently. Sites either had really small pictures or full sized pictures scaled down. You just don't see more than 1024px sized quality anymore. Browsing photothumbs instead of scrolling is so much quicker and offers more depth. We did lose a lot.
We gained more people with shallower content. Being able to lookup and find a picture of most people is an advantage. But losing flickr quality and album length means instead of a photoset you get a highlight photo with mayhe four combined.
Maintaining old sites were always an issue. Costs / site changes brought down good sites/pages so deadlinks were a huge problem. The waybackmachine could bring a site back but they rarely deep indexed or saved media so you mostly got a page full of 'x's.
Someone on here could easily build a better search engine indexing older websites and bring life back to those sites.
But be warned you've changed. Waiting a week or two or months between replies was common. Having tiny text on mobile is the norm so get ready to scroll. There was a lot of shallow content with some real gems. Patience is required.
This is absolutely true, but it's also true to say that they're very hard to find nowadays. You can in part blame the dominance of the major platforms, but I think the real culprit is probably SEO: it's very hard to out-SEO anybody with a marketing budget, or the kind of bottom feeders who are willing to spew out spun or other low-quality content that spams search results.
There's a bitter irony in realising that, back in the day, I used to bemoan the first page of search results being cluttered with "junk" from GeoCities or wherever, when I was looking for "real", "authoritative" information, whereas now I'd be much more welcoming of that kind of content appearing on page 1 of the search results.
And maybe that gets to the truth of it: good, interesting, worthwhile content has always been pretty hard to find online. You had to work for it 20 years ago, and you still have to work for it now.