That effort is the reason social media emerged. The Web before them was sufficient, it had human-curated website directories and RSS (though that I began noticing later), and web rings, and in general was fulfilling its purpose.

Now, the idea was to centralize everything under Zuck or someone else’s control. And from the very beginning it was even more ominous than now, cause people usually knew then that in the Web you should be pseudonymous, except for your personal webpage, and also that what gets out doesn’t get back in, and that an account on some site doesn’t belong to you.

What I’m disgusted with personally is how the transition to social media was spearheaded by clueless illiterate people, and instead of protecting the culture everybody else just decided that they are right and we are wrong.