It's funny that you posted this today, because an hour ago I just deleted my facebook account.

I don't have time today to read the links, but I'll come back and do this thing properly.

In the meantime have two cents: I'm tired of ugly, flashy, slow, ad-ridden, pop-up, content-recycling, free-ebook-mailing-list, infinite-scroll, lowest-common-denominator-appealing, many-fonted, autoplaying-video, social-media-linked, websites.

I know there are bastions of simplicity and good design, but they are by far the minority. Here's a quote from WIRED:
The web is Doomed.

Today the average webpage is about the same size, data-wise, as the classic computer game Doom, according to software engineer Ronan Cremin.

A compressed copy of the installer for the shareware version of Doom takes up about 2.39MB of space. Today's average webpage, meanwhile, requires users to download about 2.3MB worth of data, according to HTTP Archive, a site that tracks website performance and the technologies they use.

https://www.wired.com/2016/04/average-we...inal-doom/

One other thing. Maybe I'm being idealistic here, but I think that something great was lost when the web became so centralized. People post photos to instagram, their lives to facebook or twitter, their opinions on reddit, and on and on. Gone are the personalized websites, the pages people would make for themselves. There is so much lost when you compare the standard layout of a facebook profile to the personality that you can convey from a website of your own. Being able to change a header image is nothing compared to selecting font, colors, any other css element that fits your personality.

I'll use an analogy here. We went from an ocean full of little boats, each unique and personally crafted, to identical webpage cells on a cruise ship.

It's true that centralized websites eliminate the barrier for entry, and allow people who don't care enough to make/host their own site still have an online presence. I just think it's sad that as the web grows, traffic continues to funnel into only a few monstrous websites.