The Web We Lost ⇥ dashes.com

Grandpa Anil Dash reminisces about the way the Web used to be, yells at clouds, shouts at you to get off his lawn:

We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.

But they haven’t shown the web itself the respect and care it deserves, as a medium which has enabled them to succeed. And they’ve now narrowed the possibilites of the web for an entire generation of users who don’t realize how much more innovative and meaningful their experience could be.

There are a lot of good observations in this article, presented with a kind of view through rosy melancholic glasses. I miss the interoperability of various disparate services as much as the next guy, but the methods by which we’re able to manipulate content today are generally cleaner and more useful than they were five years ago.