To make a labored analogy I think we are doing a terrible job of maintaining the internet and access to information for future generations.

Every time we make publishing content online easier for the masses, we lose a chunk of the people who would have grown their skills to get their message out. Cloud providers, social media, bullshit like Cloudflare, etc. preventing people from learning how to do it themselves. After enough iterations there won't be enough people who know how the cloud works to keep the cloud going.

Agreed, even Google Search has been terrible at displaying historical results, I try to not be a conspiracy theorist as much as possible, but it's too easy to say that history on the web is conveniently becoming a thing people can only access increasingly (uncredited of course) within AI tools, and perhaps that might indicate why web sites are being gradually deprioritized in search results.

Hmm not sure about this. Ive been self-hosting websites since the early 2000s. Have had several sysadmin jobs managing hundreds of servers. With that experience, I still wouldn't be able to protect a website from a serious DDoS without CloudFlare or similar.

This is the history of specialization of everything. You could argue there was a time everyone knew how to grow some of their own crops and look after some farm animals.

After his rant against big tech ads, clicked on his Spotify link, tried to listen to his music, just to be blocked by a video ad. Okay.

Cool music though.

Thanks for listening!!

Asblock + Ublock on chrome or firefox are the secret sauce for that issue, also works on YouTube. ;)