Man, this really resonates with me. I learned how to program because I wanted a website for my Halo 2 team back in late HS early college. I started with a MySpace and learned some basic HTML and CSS (a minute after I learned that making a website was not just dragging things around in MS office and saving the file as "www.my-cool-website.com"). It was ugly and it was hard. Then a friend told me he had some hosting we could use and I learned to hack together some PHP in notepad.exe with just enough MySQL to add and remove things. I used for loops and that was it. No functions or classes. One big file, similar things were copied and pasted all over. No version control, just a handful of different copies of the PHP file on my computer, and deploying was uploading via FTP. I got a bootleg version of photoshop and learned how to make fancy web 2.0 graphics, and I installed PHPBB and integrated it into our site. The forum was actually pretty successful for a hot minute (a hundred or so active users) and I learned a little bit about community management.
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.
Yeah, I think the issue is there's not a lot of low-hanging fruit anymore. No one hacks together some PHP scripts to create a community website anymore, they just make a Facebook group, or use Discord or whatever.
Agreed. I think it's a deficiency of imagination. If I had the time I'd reinvent wheels all day. I'd especially love to figure out how to make some of the cool open source cloud native projects feasible for use by some college kid who wants to run a distributed ecosystem on a cluster of old laptops and raspberry pis without 10 years of devops or sysadmin experience.
I do disagree that "coding is now a privilege" or at least that it's more a privilege because of the demise of MySpace. It's easier than ever to learn how to program; it just takes time and motivation. The only thing that's harder is figuring out which technologies you actually need to learn to realize your vision (because there are so many more ways of doing things than there were in 2006); however, people are also generally nicer now than in 2006 (when I would ask people for help, they often would expect me to have read certain textbooks or know C before they would send me the link on standing up a LAMP stack). The toxic bits of StackOverflow culture were just normal--if you didn't already know the answer, you didn't deserve to know it.
Anyway, that's my 5 minute stream of recollection.