I was first introduced to computers back in 1994-1995 and the internet shortly after. Even during school days I had my own website, email server, hosting server etc. I was part of many niche forums, email groups, IRCs. I used to have a blog that I hand crafted every bit of it. From the theme to every single content and design and logo and color and art everything.

And there were a bunch of people like me. Internet was cozy, was viberant. But it is not like that now.

Every few months I come across some website like this one, calling for making a better web. But they miss the point.

The Early Web wasn’t a garden because we were better people. It broke because we demanded it become easy.

The reason most of my friends didn’t dabble a lot with the web was because it had a lot of friction. To have a voice, you had to understand FTP clients, HTML, server configurations etc. This friction acted as a filter: if you were online, you were likely driven by a specific obsession or a desire to share information.

Three things happened when we decided that publishing should be effortless for everyone:

  1. Economic incentives misaligned with content creators
  2. Standardization was required
  3. Topic to Ego

Economic Incentives

To bring the non-technical people online, we built platforms to abstract away the pain of hosting. But storage, bandwidth, and engineering are not free. By making it free for the users to gain marketshare, the platforms created a deficit that had to be filled by a third party: the advertiser.

This introduced a new perspective. The advertisers do not care about the content. They care about the consumer of the content. To satisfy the advertiser, the platform needed to prove value. This killed the open web in two specific steps:

  1. Walled Gardens: If a user subscribes via RSS or follows a hyperlink to a personal blog, the platform loses the signal. To monetize the user, the platform had to build walls. Discovery became algorithmic not to help you find things, but to ensure you never left.

  2. Engagement: Since the user isn’t paying, the only metric of success is “time spent.” The platform must prioritize content that arrests attention, not content that informs or nourishes. Doom scrolling/infinite feed is because of this.

Standardization

Reducing the friction to generate and publish content lead to abundance in content. As the network of content grew, the “village model”—where you visited specific URLs like you visit a friend’s house—collapsed. You couldn’t know where to go.

So we built the aggregators. We built them to solve the problem of abundance. But in doing so, we introduced a new economic imperative: Standardization.

To aggregate a billion voices, you must first strip them of their context. You cannot index a thousand different artistic expressions; you can only index “Content.” To make the web searchable, and later “feedable,” we had to flatten it. The distinct, jagged HTML of a personal site was smoothed into the uniform grey rectangle of a social media post. This wasn’t malice; it was an engineering necessity for scale.

When you read a personal website in 2004, you were a guest in someone’s living room. You tolerated their bad wallpaper (backgrounds), their quirky furniture (navigation), and their rambling stories because you were in their space.

Today, you are not a guest; you are a consumer in a cafeteria. The content is brought to your tray. And because you are now a consumer, you have developed the impatience of one. When we encounter a site today that refuses to standardize—one that uses odd fonts, slow animations, or artistic layouts—we recoil. We hit “Reader Mode” to strip the paint off the walls, demanding raw data. We have become efficiency machines, stripping away the humanity of the creator to process their output faster.

This is the “Radical Monopoly” of the modern web: the tools we built to manage the information overload have retrained our brains to reject anything that doesn’t fit the mold.

Topic to Ego

The architecture of conversation underwent a quiet, fatal inversion. The Old Web (Forums, Usenet, Wikis) was Topic-Centric. The atomic unit of organization was the “Thread.” In a thread, the Idea is the hero. The hierarchy is built around the subject matter. And it is public. Identity is secondary; you are a username attached to an argument. If a nobody posted a profound solution to a coding problem, it rose to the top because the topic was the destination.

For instance there is a topic on how to grow in the Tech career path, and if someone posted “hard work is the key to success” it would get down-voted as it is pointless fortune cookie statement with nothing actionable.

The New Web (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) is User-Centric. The atomic unit of organization is the “Profile.” In a feed, the Identity is the hero. The hierarchy is built around the social graph (followers). It is mostly closed. The Idea is secondary; it is merely a caption to the user’s existence.

This shift destroyed the meritocracy of ideas. In a User-Centric architecture, truth does not propagate; popularity propagates. A celebrity saying “Good morning” generates more economic activity than an expert explaining a crisis, because the architecture prioritizes the who over the what.

Second, as it mattered more on who said it and to which circle they said it, original ideas died. People just plagiarize the same ideas and have sloppy takes in eco chambers and still create a lot of engagement.

The result

By walling off distribution to track metrics, we destroyed the connective tissue of the web—the hyperlink. And by shifting from Topics to Profiles, we turned a library into a stage. We replaced the pursuit of knowledge with the performance of self.

What cannot be undone is the expectation of “free.” The masses have been trained that hosting is a natural right and that their attention is a worthless commodity. They will not go back to paying for servers, and they will not go back to systems that do not center their identity. The economic incentives for platforms to keep us in the feed—extracting attention to sell to advertisers—are too structurally sound to be dismantled by nostalgia. The “Industrial Web” is not a mistake; it is the final, optimized form of a network designed for commerce and scale.

So, where does that leave us?

It leaves us with the realization that the “Old Web” cannot be restored as a global standard, but it can be reclaimed as a private practice. The conflict between the “Feed” (scale, efficiency, consumption) and the “Garden” (inefficiency, expression, patience) is permanent.

The only way to win is to stop trying to scale the garden. We must accept that a personal website, a quiet blog, or a hand-coded project is no longer a public utility. It is a deliberate act of inefficiency.

We are not going to save the internet. It is too paved, too profitable, and too efficient to be saved. But we can still live in the cracks in the pavement, provided we are willing to do the one thing the modern web hates most: Take our time.