@andybaio yeah, I’m old enough to remember when AOL added this mysterious section called “the internet” with 4 areas of unknown use: gopher, ftp, news groups, and something called the World Wide Web.
The “open social web” was like a bunch of small towns. Wonderful if you were born in the right one but if not wandering the random human connections was hard and many gave up on the way. Early Twitter/Reddit made that discovery a lot easier.
So what we have now is rotten and terrible, but let’s not over romanticize our past silos.