>>12745People say the modern net is too vain, but is it? IMO it's actually the opposite; people fade into the background too much these days.
For example, take the decline of personal sites. In the 90s and early 2000s, you made your own site and hosted it on something like geocities or anglefire. Since you were building it from the ground up, it was 100% yours and you could do whatever you wanted with it.
By the mid-2000s, most people used blogging services like livejournal and blogspot. They were a bit more restrictive in terms of design since the baseline functionality had already been decided for you, and they had more emphasis on user to user interaction, but the things hosted on them could still effectively be considered their own sites.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s, people were on tumblr. Tumblr still gave a ton of customization; moreso than even some of the blogging services that inspired it. But it was clear that the focus wasn't really on the individual user anymore. It made a big deal out of sharing and responding to other people's content, and there were lots of users who did nothing but that. It was less about you and more about your place in the culture surrounding you.
Fast forward to today, and everyone's on twitter, which is like tumblr but even more limited. There's next to no customization, and you're restricted to 256 characters per post. Twitter accounts are completely interchangeable, and their content is highly ephemeral.
Individual users aren't important anymore, which sucks because that's what it used to be all about.