> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper.

I wish that were true. The desktop site editors (Frontpage, Dreamweaver) are long dead. There are barriers to My First PHP Site that just weren’t there before: you can’t put up a site without https (unless you want scary browser warnings and no Google coverage), you can’t send mail without a whole bunch of complex server headers and expect it to be delivered, you can’t make a simple mistake in your code without the server being compromised by constantly scanning nefarious bots. And that’s even before you get on to the insane complexity of the frontend tech and tooling if you want to make anything look vaguely contemporary.

Discovery is broken - check out the story posted here the other day about Google ranking SEO review churn above independent sites. Facebook and Twitter will randomly bury your promo work because they don’t like the links in it for some reason. And if your independent site is in the same area as a VC-funded one, you’ll be buried by the sheer weight of their marketing paid by the free VC money.

You can still build a site with Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix. It won’t do much but it’ll exist. But no one will find it.

Wordpress is kind of forever. I was helping someone with a decade-old managed wordpress a little while ago; it required updating plugins and ditching a few of the old ones, but otherwise a relatively simple process.

> But no one will find it.

The spam problem. This destroyed USENET, and has now destroyed blogs. People retreat to the half-dozen sites that have half-effective spam fighting. Twitter has abandoned spam fighting and is slowly sinking as a result.

> Creating and hosting a website has never been easier and cheaper. Yet for some reason the big companies are dominating more and more. It could be my perception because I was just a kid back then, but there seemed to be more independent sites in the 2000s than now, despite then being harder and more expensive to host a site. It doesn’t make sense to me.

The thing that's really, really important to understand is that lowering barriers to entry leads to more consolidation, not less, because any products that are even of slightly better quality/service/price whatever end up taking nearly all the market.

Yes, in the late 90s and early 00s there were tons of independent sites (if you're too young to be familiar with it, look at the Wikipedia page for GeoCities). And while we may have some nostalgia for that now, the fact is that 95% (I'd probably say 99.9%) of the sites were total crap. Probably over half of them were "Under Construction" banners, but even the ones with actual content were usually pretty atrocious even if you ignore the "murder on the eyes" visual design.

With so much content but limited time and attention, most people don't actually want to wade through the 95%+ of crap - they just want to see the best stuff. So they go to the "market leaders", which can attract more eyeballs and, importantly, more funding to ensure people creating these sites are highly paid to attract the best people.

Consolidation on narrow themes is ensured by our reliance on query->answer search engines.

If you think about the shape of the web at the time Google introduced PageRank, It was a huge graph of content connected by fine-grained related interests. It got that way by people doing the work of drawing those relations; and it's a lot of work, given that the number of potential relations is essentially proportional to the square of all existing content. All of the interesting information is in the edges of that graph.

Who's doing that work now? PageRank incentivized people to trade links for the purpose of ranking higher on Google. People became reliant on the convenience of Google to find anything to the point that if you don't rank on Google, you don't exist. People who created content for the sake of the content, and interacting for the sake of interaction, stopped doing it because why waste time yelling into the void? People who felt like they were providing for the community by hosting these sites had no reason to continue. Without people creating, exploring, interacting, and relating content based on pure interests, there's nobody doing the hard work to organize the web in a way that makes it traversable.

We're entirely reliant on platforms showing us the content they want us to see, and what they want above all else is for users to be predictable. If your interests and behaviors are too nuanced for the algorithms to get a handle on, you can't be categorized, packaged, and sold to advertisers with some expected conversion rate.

At this point in time, most of the people who spend time on the internet have never even experienced anything different, and those who have barely remember. If your business relies on their attention, what good is a website going to do you? Your income relies on appealing to social media algorithms, not gaining the trust of the people who used to shape the web.