&gt; Compare this to handwriting and uploading html files, and it seems like we&#x27;ve gone backwards.<p>But this isn&#x27;t apple and oranges; a blog with themes and whatnot is much more sophisticated than the HTML CSS rendering defaults. IMO, a HTML page without any CSS is not that bad looking and you don&#x27;t really need it. Heck, even a text file written with a little bit of care is perfectly readable.)<p>And the information overload isn&#x27;t much of a problem: most people know immediately that static site generators aren&#x27;t for them.<p>&gt; Look at medium, and look at instagram. A slightly better publishing experience dominates.<p>Look at all the blogs using Wordpress, and everything written on Twitter and Facebook.<p>&gt; And to further that note, how would you self host a photo site for mobile? Is that even possible? How would you begin?<p>I am not entirely sure what a &#x27;photo site for mobile&#x27; is, but I am sure that it has no equivalents from before 2006 or so which you could claim it is harder or more complicated than, and I suspect that you could get 95% of the value from a static HTML page sitting on S3 containing a bunch of &lt;img&gt; tags and a &#x27;viewport&#x27; &lt;meta&gt; tag that you copy-pasted from a StackOverflow post you found by googling &#x27;how to make a mobile html page&#x27;.