This NYMag piece reminds me of all the time I used to spend on sites like Plastic, Slashdot, Memepool, and (yes, sadly) Fark. There is definitely some you-can’t-go-home-again syndrome going on (just like how those episodes of Jason Of Star Command don’t really hold up when I watch them now on YouTube), but the author is right. We have lost something important in letting all this wild and and heterogeneous content be consolidated into a small handful of closed platforms.