I think original web standards were solving a completely different problem: sharing information.

Modern Internet is 45% appearances and 50% search traffic optimizations. For better or worse we lost all usable registries of websites, we lost appearance-less and traffic considerations-less websites. Information-focused Web is pretty much dead.

Maybe these ideas did not scale and did not monetize that well, but we will never really know what information-focused version of Internet would have looked like because evolution took it elsewhere. Unless we try building another one with different principles and limitations at the core.

The current web supports flat information delivery, and it's there if you want it. Wikipedia can be presented in pure text. If you write a story or an essay you can post it in many places, including your own web site.

Perhaps what's needed is for an alternative search engine. Assert that you will only index a site that meets some strict set of limits. If that's what people want they will use that engine. If it's popular sites will have have to find ways to get listed, e.g. "simple.amazon.com" which supports that standard.

I agree. Even where blogging and sharing information is still around, it is strongly linked with brand-building, monetization, and engagement-maxxing. Look at all the old Wordpress bloggers who switch to Substack in order to have some eyeballs on their posts, and then inevitably begin conforming to its ethos willingly or unwillingly.

For me, the information-sharing part of the internet now is the shadow libraries. I can get access to all (well, still not quite all) journals and university-press publications from the last century? Awesome. Vastly more informative than some blogger who nowadays is probably trying to monetize my attention.