"How the Blog Broke the Web"

"In ‘94, a college student named Justin Hall broke free from the table of contents format. He added to the top of his homepage daily, and he headlined each section with the date. He shared everything: from interesting links he found to his experiments with sex and drugs.

Justin’s Links became the first daily web diary.

That’s what they were called then… web diaries. (The name weblogcame a few years later, as some of their writers moved away from extremely personal topics.)...

When jjg compiled his list of “web logs” in early 1999, there were only 23. That’s not a typo: Twenty-three, twenty-three web logs on the internet, ah ah ah. No doubt he missed many — and a bunch had lived and died by then, including mine — but by what kind of multiplier? Five? Ten times? So there were what, maybe 230 web logs?...

Homepages had a timeless quality, an index of interesting or useful or relevant things about a topic or about a person. You didn’t reload a homepage every day in pursuit of novelty. (That’s what Netscape’s What’s Cool was for!)

Chronological content was in the minority."

https://stackingthebricks.com/how-blogs-broke-the-web/

I fully miss homepages. 

I miss the old weird internet where you went to a site because your friend told you about it and spelled it for you, and you looked through every section and peeked into someone's mind that way. Found weird quizzes and puzzles and flash games and stories. 

but when I really think about it, I don't actually want to go back. I think I just wish that that internet still existed for someone, for some 12-year-old waiting to be picked up from school, exploring secret silly worlds in the library with their friends

FB: "the damn reverse chronology bias — once called into creation, it hungers eternally — sought its next victim. Myspace. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Pinterest, of all things. Today these social publishing tools are beginning to buck reverse chronological sort; they’re introducing algorithm sort, to surface content not by time posted but by popularity, or expected interactions, based on individual and group history. There is even less control than ever before.

There are no more quirky homepages."