'Where Have All the Websites Gone?'

An anonymous reader shares an essay: No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos. No, we get our content from a For You Page now -- algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn't matter much. So long as it's one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It's a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something's missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? A tweet went viral this Thanksgiving when a Twitter user posed a question to their followers. (The tweet said: "It feels like there are no websites anymore. There used to be so many websites you could go on. Where did all the websites go?") A peek at the comments, and I could only assume the tweet struck a nerve. Everyone had their own answer. Some comments blamed the app-ification of the web. "Everything is an app now!," one user replied. Others point to the death of Adobe Flash and how so many sites and games died along with it. Everyone agrees that websites have indeed vanished, and we all miss the days we were free to visit them.

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