The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.
They may never be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but that's because the web has grown in audience to people looking for something similar to watching TV, reading newspapers and going to the pub. Those activities will always be more popular than people hacking in a garage, but they can coexist.
Relatively wholesome sites like Wikipedia can't compete on numbers and hours of visitors because they limit themselves mostly to 'see also', and commentary is split onto another page so you have to choose to see it every time.
Wikipedia is definitely able to compete. It is the 5th most popular website, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of every online tabloid and content farm.
and that is less guaranteed considering market forces and network effects.
The problem is that nobody will pay you by definition and you are in an arms race against commercial interests. Does not sound sustainable.
I'm afraid we help in killing it everytime we:
- Complain about styling and form
- Worry about the SEO effect of what we link to
- etc
I wish people would start to create more weird and wonderful pages. Pages without styling. Pages with nice styling. Pages with weird styling. But most importantly full of text content, links to friends and weird projects we love, images and videos etc.
Give me a ready-made virtual machine image [1] pre-configured to share files. I don't care about the protocols, I don't care about super-duper-unbreakable encryption because I won't share or host copyrighted content nor wombat porn.
[1] Not a freaking docker image or whatnot (hi, Mediagoblin!) - if you want it to succeed it has to be dead simple so that mere mortals can do it.