I don't think that's all of it. The Internet used to be these networks that we could, through tools, arrange to be around us. We'd have our e-mail network and our Usenet network and our IRC network, and we have ways to view all those things that aggregated among different e-mail servers and different USENET groups and different IRC channels, and gave us a view around How We We Engaging With The Content (e-mail for one-to-one or one-to-many longform discussion, USENET for many-to-many longform discussion, IRC for short-form discussion, both one-to-one and many-to-many). Now, instead of forming the center of our own Internet experience, there's these silos -- Twitter, Facebook, Slack -- and we form a network around the silo instead of our networks having us at the center.

Now, having large number of people makes many of the features of these silos more desirable, they're not unrelated. But if you could find a way to scale up the "me-centric" view of the web to modern needs, then everyone -- early adopters and the mass audience -- would both benefit, I think.