> Your post is oddly hyper-focused on pointing out the negatives

because people are hyper-focused on the negatives of the "current" web, or acting like the sites they used to love can't be recreated anymore..

> it was just a bunch of people writing about themselves, their interests, and generally being creative.

There still are. on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, 5ch and other Japanese subcommunities.. the fact that they're all "silo'ed" into these less-than-benign corpoctopuses is another matter, but people are still people'ing