Link: The Web We Lost
Anil Dash talks about how the rise of closed social networks — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on — has caused many of the strengths of the web to be hidden away from many new users of the web.
Anil first talks about how some of the functions of the web that were taken for granted five or ten years ago are no longer exposed in an obvious manner and moves on to thinking about what effect that has on assumptions made about what is possible:
This isn’t our web today. We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.
But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilities of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.