allisonre: this that has been making the rounds https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/ i'm always struck by sentences like "the technical barrier went up" that don't attribute what happened to any cause in particular. technical barriers are not agents and they do not go up on their own (nor for that matter are "technical barriers" one monolithic thing that move in a single direction). if you're going to make a plan of action, you have to figure out *who and what* changed (the perception of) "technical barriers"
i think you could make a good case that the "technical barriers went up" in web dev in particular due to the web becoming commercialized: when you're worrying about click throughs and seo and conversion rates, and moving at capital pace, you make code and use frameworks that sacrifice legibility for extraction and dev velocity. view source is useless nowadays because of the buildup of cruft related to those goals (at least partially, imo)
brib 
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@aparrish That was very much my reaction too. The difficulty of building a 90s-era website is very much the same now as it was back then - it's still basically the same HTML and CSS under the hood (except, perhaps, for the dreaded marquee).
In some ways it's easier because's there's a bunch of free hosting services and tutorials, in some ways it's harder because it's hard to wade through the slop to find good tutorials (although notably, this is very much the fault of AI).
What has changed is the expectations. If you want your website to look like a "modern" commercial website, then yeah, doing that with simple HTML is hard, and agentic AI incidentally appears to be good at this style (to the point where I suspect a poorly-functioning site in that style is slop). But if you think that's the only way to go about things, then, well... let's just say Neocities wants to have a word with you
R@brib @aparrish i think you're basically right about "expectations", but imo it's not (just?) about the look
the "large company commercial website" tooling _really_ did make *some* things easier (in exchange for usually making something else harder)
i remember how much _excitement_ there was (whether artificially amplified or not) as language-specific package managers (e.g. npm, although there was bower for a bit) and javascript bundlers (most prominently browserify back then, probably webpack nowadays) first took off, and made *that specific style* of code reuse way easier. people were doing things like "i can import an entire 3d graphics framework (three.js) and physics library (ammo.js?) and make something with it"
documentation certainly hasn't kept up, and i'm still generally looking for ways out of the current mess