I think carrd might be one of the worst things that's happened to the net
"here's my commission carrd: it has a TOS and examples and... no contact information or links"
IMO we should be democratising the fundamentals of building a website, not creating more platforms that paper over it
Isn't it great how most people evolve on the internet using computing platforms that are so limited that "write index.html in notepad++ and upload it to a web host with FileZilla or some shit" is a massive order, making "surrender your data and control to a for-profit entity that has A Shiny App For Your Device" the easiest and more streamlined option.
i feel like we're all1 partially responsible for this.
we used to have WYSIWYG page builder tools. geocities had Yahoo!™ SiteBuilder. windows had Microsoft FrontPage. Adobe had DreamWeaver. We had the tools to make websites easier in a way where normal ordinary people could just drag and drop shit how they wanted it.
and we all collectively said, wow, these tools suck ass! haha, look at how terrible they are! they spit out spaghetti html and they're awful to use! writing everything in notepad was the ideal, we even had little 88×31 buttons to show how elite we were!
...
anyway, it's 20 years later and now everything is instead spaghetti javascript and all of the simple "make your own html pages and upload them" tools are dead. basic website hosting is hard to find and getting shittier. "free" setups like neocities2 restrict you from using normal, standard tools like ftp clients, requiring you to instead use a proprietary browser interface. and other "free" website builders out there are just a template and some images you can swap out, hosted on their own systems.
on top of that, you can't just make a website. it has to be a website that works on desktop and mobile, two wildly different environments with wildly different accessibility and usability needs, where without a magic incantation about device viewport scaling or whatever your page will immediately look like shit and be unreadable without zooming in 500%.
the bar of entry to web design and development has been raised far too highly and we're all worse for it.
1: this is a generalization. this does not include every single person on earth.
2: i want to love neocities, but my first experience was "i want to make a cool retro website using my windows 98 laptop", and finding out that unless you pay money you couldn't use a normal ftp client was like. i'd rather just pay that much for shared hosting and not even have to bother with any of their shit.
even ignoring the web, how much your program had to do to count as a real program increased drastically from the 80s to the 90s, and a fair amount from the 90s to the 2000s
I miss janky and nearly unusable VB4 tools, now that you can't even create a simple hello world dialog without nested levels of desktop frameworks. Hell, I miss the janky weird shit you used to be able to do with iframes, Flash, even ActiveX. They all sucked, but in replacing them we managed to build alternatives that do not meaningfully challenge the power structures and incentives that made them suck, and that set the barrier to entry so absurdly high that participation is all but impossible for the vast majority of people.