A recent post on Substack, “Content containerization ruined the web”, suggests the problem with the modern internet is containerization. Not, to be clear, virtual machine/Docker containerization, but rather the reality that we get our content via a small number (the post suggests 4) of aggregators. The result:
People don’t spend time creating beautiful compelling personal websites because nobody will visit anyway. If you want people to consume what you produce, you go where the eyeballs are. You containerize your content into the shape required by the platform and throw it into the stream.
It’s an appealing argument, but not correct in my view. For one thing, Google still tops the list of most-visited websites. According to Semrush as of April 2025:
| Domain | Visits |
|---|---|
| google.com | 92.70B |
| youtube.com | 42.82B |
| facebook.com | 9.14B |
| instagram.com | 5.38B |
| wikipedia.org | 4.55B |
| chatgpt.com | 4.46B |
| bing.com | 4.19B |
| pornhub.com | 4.14B |
| reddit.com | 4.02B |
| x.com | 3.39B |
| whatsapp.com | 2.69B |
Google illustrates the web has always had content containerization in that pages can be shared with a short text string called a URL. Yes there are some things that a page can add to make the URL look nicer on aggregation platforms. And some platforms are hobbling posts with links due to failing to understand their own product. But it’s still possible to create a humble HTML page, put it on a server and share the URL to get traffic.
So what happened to the weird and wonderful web of the past? Take Homestar Runner that the post mentioned. It started as a Flash animation web comicy sort of thing. Unfortunately the creators of the site, Mike and Matt Chapman, put the site on hiatus in 2009 because of other projects, including writing for television shows. A few years ago the content was moved to YouTube because it’s gotten harder and harder to play Flash videos.[1] The YouTube channel is missing a lot of the charm of the old site, which had Easter egg jokes and rotating skins for the homepage.
It’s easy to imagine an internet in 2025 full of Homestar Runner sites if it weren’t for YouTube squeezing out that creativity. But that would be drawing the wrong conclusion from the available evidence. It be like looking at the career of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and lamenting the lack of skyhooks because of the three-point line in the modern NBA. That ignores Kareem’s unique physical dimensions and the years of practice required to perfect it. In the era of Flash, The Brothers Chaps stood out because of their comedic and artistic talents which would have been exceptional in any time period. Most of the content from that era wasn’t very good. We only remember the best.
YouTube, it turns out, became the default way to distribute video because it’s so easy to create content. With as little as an inexpensive webcam, people can record and upload videos in a fraction of the time it took to animate even a short cartoon. That opened up, rather than reduced, the range of content. Want to make a globe-trotting reality show/game on a shoestring budget?[2] Want to film random activities in slow motion?[3] Want to buy project cars and show off the process of making them awesome?[4] These and thousands of other ideas can be shared on YouTube without knowing how to create a website or manage traffic spikes.
Creating a website is easier than ever, but it still requires endless tinkering. The most popular content management system, WordPress, only just barely clears the bar of workable. As a consultant, I found my clients had the same questions about how to set up a site that I had when I created my first site on Geocities. The aggregator sites aren’t squeezing content into uniform boxes as much as they are enabling more people to create content. It’s just a lot more convenient to type a few words on Facebook or Twitter or Reddit than to figure out how to host your own site.
Nostalgia makes us forget the 90% crap of the past, but we can’t ignore it in the present. Our current platforms fall short of the ideal, especially community platforms, but I do think they have enabled more creativity than they have stifled.
Recently they revived the website using Ruffle, an open source Flash emulator. ↩︎