The fact that MySpace was mainstream and allowed for HTML/CSS hacking did exactly what the article said -- it tricked a generation of teenagers into learning how to do that "weird internet stuff."

For the most part, if you want to do anything like that now you're gonna be stuck figuring out domains and hosting and whatnot which isn't nearly as fun as typing some HTML into the platform you and your friends already use. So not as many people are going to do it.

Police state utopia!

I remember laying out my page like a pink and black newspaper. All that work for no one to read lol.

But now it is essentially my career

Perhaps it is the way we think about the internet that has also changed...

Back in the day, when I wanted to find something on the internet, I knew I was going to have to dig and search and explore. My mind expected this experience.

Since web 2.0, my mind doesn't work the same way.

Recently I wanted to find information on hacking a device I had obtained - but of course any search query I could throw at search engines only yielded ways to buy it or low-effort reviews. I tried marginalia but it seems like the index wasn't quite large enough for my purpose yet.

If your primary mechanism is Hacker News, the internet is going to look like it's dominated by a bunch of startups and open source projects.

If your primary mechanism is Twitter, the internet is going to be dominated by big-name thought leaders, there will appear to be a lot of outrage and inflamed conflict, maybe some culture wars stuff will stay on your radar.

If your primary mechanism is Google, then a bunch of huge websites are going to be extremely prominent: Wikipedia, Goodreads, WebMD, Pinterest, Stackoverflow, etc. It's also going to look like every blog is just a bunch of spam.

If your primary mechanism is Facebook, then the web will look like a bunch of tabloid news articles, try-hard viral videos, minions memes.

and so on and so forth.

In other words, it's a bunch of dead websites and there is little incentive to create anything out of the ordinary.

For example, browsing a website that looks original, but is likely abandoned is a very different experience from browsing it in the 90s or early 00s when it was a part of something big, new and exciting. Even if the content is identical. The same principle applies to authoring.

I have seen countless claims that all the technology that someone could use in the 90s is still available. Regardless of whether it's true or not (mostly not), it misses the point. The social project that was web 1.0 is now defunct.

Paradoxically, the only way to create something equivalent to old-school web now is to invent something entirely new.

Web 1.0 was and still is a fringe project by and for oddballs. Just like most people in the '90s didn't know how to get on the web, most people today can't find their way past google and social media. In that regard, it's very much still the same.