> I also think (though don't have the numbers) that there are many more hobby sites now than there were in, say, 1995, because the whole web is so much bigger.
I severely doubt this. 1995-2004(?), essentially pre-myspace, was an era when many of us had a homepage as a hobby; some went into blogging as well, but still on their own site.
Compare it to the web today: everyone is posting content* on silos and a most don't event bother thinking of a website. Convenience, they say, but reality is that everyone thinks they might be able to make a living out of that hobby.
* "content" in the context of silos is a tricky thing to be honest. When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo? When I say modern, I mean Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; WordPress and Tumblr are different, being more like providers of websites.
It sounds like you're talking about relative numbers, and I have no disagreement there, but I'm talking about absolute numbers. There just weren't that many people online in 1995, so even a large fraction then can easily be less than a very small fraction now.
I know lots of people with websites (ex: my own, https://jefftk.com) and a lot of this is it's so much easier and cheaper now. You don't have to be a sysadmin or be friends with one, domains cost 10x less than they used to, many more people have internet access, etc.
> When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo?
I think it depends a lot who your friends are, what subcultures you're in, and how you choose who to follow. My Facebook feed is mostly my friends talking about interesting things and I like it a lot.
Deleting it is one option, but another is teaching FB to show you posts by friends who have more interesting things to say. This has worked well for me, though I also expect it depends on your friends and how they use FB.
I severely doubt this. 1995-2004(?), essentially pre-myspace, was an era when many of us had a homepage as a hobby; some went into blogging as well, but still on their own site.
Compare it to the web today: everyone is posting content* on silos and a most don't event bother thinking of a website. Convenience, they say, but reality is that everyone thinks they might be able to make a living out of that hobby.
Let me quote a comment from this very site: "It's a shame to ruin a perfectly good hobby by making it a job." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728367
* "content" in the context of silos is a tricky thing to be honest. When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo? When I say modern, I mean Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; WordPress and Tumblr are different, being more like providers of websites.