Everything you said is good, but I think it misses the point of the blog post.

The internet was special because it was a place to share those weird, human endeavors.

I can do all I want in the solitude of my home but I want to share it! The internet is where you can find people with common interests that you can't find in people you know IRL. That was the escape. Finally you feel less alone, a stranger on the other side of the world feels the same way!

That's what was optimized. We were herded into centralized algorithmic bubbles, optimized for creation and consumption but not for sharing. Sharing has some care in it, a common need for something, a connection between two or more people. The internet has been optimized for consumption. Everyone is consuming in the same place, repeating the same jokes, and it all moves too fast to even recognize the same usernames you might see.

It all moves too fast, there's little incentive for platform owners to make a place where people actually connect at the speed of human socializing because if you're busy connecting, you're not seeing the next ad.

Also I'd just like to add, reddit killed the classic forum. Many are gone, some are holding on by a thread. You can't just "avoid the bad parts" because the bad parts consumed the good parts.

Just realised that reading your message, I really feel this, I've been designing a game and I've recently been having discussions with friends and people interested in it and it's just a really different experience talking with them vs posting about it, don't get me wrong, having a weekly cadence is nice and Sharing Saturdays can be really helpful to get the word out there, but it's such a different interaction and mindspace I end up in during the "plan to explain to people in this weird advertising, but not process about my passion project", vs "talk to someone about my passion"

And I'm aware that these are different activities, but I don't think they should be as far apart emotionally as they end up being?

For example the last discussion I had we talked about how I was exploring connecting the impact of actions in the small scale to the large scale, for example how designing a particular construct or vehicle, would change how efficiently a player would be able to mine and that would then impact how much that particular player made from mining in that area

This creates all sorts of interesting questions and even just that discussion was engaging