Or rather, the people on the web are too serious. Even ignoring all the corporate, governmental and educational sites the remaining individual endeavors reek of commercialism. All those hit-counters, guestbooks, web rings and banner exchanges are just proof that even the family dog's web site aspires to a certain public recognition if not greatness. You'd think that this growing desire to break into publishing via the web would boost the kind and quality of available reading material but of course the reverse is happening. There is a strange sameness to many of the new personal sites which I can only attribute to an awareness of audience.
People today seem aware that they're on display.
They hold back from revealing anything too embarrassing, ugly or just plain banal. In the early web days, putting up a so-called vanity site was the electronic version of the message in a bottle. Diaryland diaries have recaptured the quality of public anonymity which so characterized the original web. It's nearly impossible to locate someone's diary unless the writer themselves sends you the url. And in what is perhaps most revealing about the diaryland phenomenon is that many of the now-professional writers I know who have diaries aren't sharing their urls.