I absolutely agree with you I remember the early days of BBS, web forums and personal websites dedicated to a subject, no agenda, no people with time on their hands waiting to flame you, no second guessing what you posted in case someone might be slightly offended. For me it’s akin to growing up in the 70s where on the weekends or summer hols your parents would tell you to bugger off and return at various feeding times, in a world with 3 tv channels and I was the remote (I was the youngest so it was always me), and a village where I (as an 8 yo) could walk from home through the village high street to the ironmongers to get bird seed (a walk of 3 miles round trip) and everyone greeted you, and you greeted them. Not everything was perfect in that world, just as in the early days of the internet, not everything was perfect. But it seemed simpler, more honest and people didn’t hide behind a keyboard with their overly nasty opinions, but it did seem as if people lived and let live. Let’s bring back those lovely village communities, websites with specialist content that people wanted to read, not 3 second attention span social media making everyone feel insecure and inadequate about themselves. Rant over 😹Oh yes. Nailed it. Social media is unquestionably one of the biggest mistakes of our time. No sequence of words exists that conveys just how awful it is or how much I loathe it. It's a monster and it has fundamentally changed society and changed how we interface with one another and the world around us, for the worst.
I miss websites because they were dedicated spaces for a particular topic, and we visited them on purpose. Nowadays, social media accounts have replaced websites and if we have an interest in a topic we have to visit social media accounts/YouTube channels. The issue with that is we get utter shite in our face along the way, like endless intrusive ads, sponsors, annoying clickbait, "shorts" and other nonsense trying to rob us of our attention and time.
Bring back websites!