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Comment by mojuba | Hacker News Reader

Keep in mind the early websites were mostly built by an enthusiast minority, technical or not but willing to learn HTML and Netscape Composer. You can't expect the whole humanity to be as enthusiastic. The skyscraper era, no matter how much we all hate it, makes the web more democratic: it gives everyone some standardized space (Facebook, Youtube, etc) with algorithmized discovery which is parking and elevators if you want to continue the analogy.

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Hard to live through what social media has done to society over the past decade without at least entertaining the idea that the higher barrier to entry of being online was maybe not a bad thing.

yes, for sure! It was a different time. Early website authors were pioneers. They had something worth sharing and they thought it worthwhile enough to learn some coding. Nobody was trying to push ads and monetize, and there was no ubiquitous tracking or cookies

I don't disagree but notice how it's about the second decade of Web 2.0, not the first one. Profit-driven algorithms is a separate era in its own right. I.e. you can't blame the skyscrapers themselves for your shitty life, you just need to demand more regulation.

If the skyscraper is designed with elevators that try to keep me in and away from the first floor so I don't leave I can definitely complain.

If we're talking about the internet before Eternal September, maybe, but putting up a site on Geocities or Tripod or using Dreamweaver certainly was not a high barrier to entry.

I wouldn't agree that the higher barrier to entry was a good thing, but I also would say that the barrier to entry was actually pretty low, with angelfire, geocities, etc. Dreamweaver + other wysiwyg, and the lack of a necessity of a giant js framework with bundling and tree-shaking.

The problem is that the barrier to entry got too low, so it was necessary for large companies to interpose themselves between producers and audiences, starting with google (becoming something other than a grep for the web, and instead becoming the editor and main income source for the web) and expanding outwards into facebook.

Remember that we started with walled gardens like AOL and Compuserve, and the web (and the end of those companies) was people desperate to break out of them. Now people have been herded in again since the indexers bought the ad companies.

Facebook and YouTube are top-down managed systems, and I think it is a real disservice to the idea of democracy to call this sort of thing “more democratic.” They are democratic like a mall is, which is to say, not.

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