Frankly, I’m getting kind of sick of companies smoothing over everything technical in computers in the current day. Not just in the horrific corporate artstyle that everyone has seen infect every page, sucking out any modecum of human connection until all thats left is a field of white that marketing executives find innofensive. I’m talking about the actual functionality of the damn things, and just how hand holdy these sites have become, expertly designed to NOT teach you any kind of transferrable skills in order to keep you on their platform. It’s perfectly designed to give the layman exactly what they want (a website that looks “clean and modern”), but only through the most basic of elements. Anything more, and you got to pay up. Of course. And of course, there is no option to even attempt to write your own HTML, its all silently draped behind a “clean” UI, out of sight, out of mind. And it’s not just building websites that invent these banall services designed to keep the layman from learning anything about the inner workings, everything feels like it’s blocking off any kind of transferrable coding skills. Forum and social media customization, being able to edit the CSS to express yourself, was replaced by sometimes getting to pick a banner. Unique and easily edible window themes were replaced by.. getting to pick your accent color and having to PAY to put the taskbar where its supposed to be (cough W11). The average person has NOWHERE to experiment with writing code in a place that has tangible results. I truly think that if social medias had a form of HTML and CSS, there would be far more people trying to learn it, possibly making the next step of making their own site less intimidating. Getting more people to learn about something is all about making that first step as easy as possible, and all these sites want to do is divert that spark of “i want to make a site” into “i can only make a site exactly how this company wants me to, and if i want to use 80% of the features most sites have, i have to buy into this product”. In short, I hate these sites, but I don’t blame the people who use them. I just wish that more was done to make that first step of experimentation not as difficult as commiting to a full site.

Also, if you’re wondering why this is in the hidden section, I kinda don’t have a place for blog posts yet. I’ll probably remove this line once I make a proper one.