Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird?

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Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird? (jarredsumner.com)

MySpace inspired a generation of teenagers to learn how to code. We have Dark Mode now, but where did all the glitter go?

During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.

I agree entirely with Jarred: in discouraging people from having their own web presences and in locking-down our shared social spaces online, we’re making the Web feel increasingly flat, soulless, and – dare I say is – joyless. MDX seems really cool, but I’m not yet convinced that it alone solves the underlying problem of content creators feeling that they should (or must) use dry, boring silos for the things they produce rather than their own space (in which they’d be able to express their personalities and the personality of the things they were sharing). It may well lower the barrier to producing interactive personal sites a little (as well as having other applications, I’m sure!), but we’re going to need more than that to drag people away from Facebook, Medium, Twitter and the like.

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