Most of the stuff this guy is bitching about is stuff that is STILL THERE. You can still create your own website and post whatever the hell you like, create whatever community you damn well please, etc. Unless you're in a country like China or Iran, you have every bit as much freedom today on the internet as you did 10 or 15 years ago.
Just because people CHOOSE to use social sites like Facebook and give up certain freedoms in the process doesn't mean anything has been lost. About the only area where I see where freedom has really been lost is in the increasing prevalence of tablets, phones, and likely soon even laptops that are behind software "walled gardens," like iOS. And even if that case, no one is *forcing* anyone to buy those devices.
And as for complaining about the lack of standards in sites sharing info, well WTF is new? Companies developing proprietary formats for sharing info is hardly something that Twitter just discovered recently.
To me this guy just sounds like another FOSS zealot bitching because the world doesn't work like he wants it to, and things didn't turn out like the Open Source utopia he had envisioned in 2000.
Well to be fair he does have some points. Not that we so much 'lost' anything on the 'net, just that the way it is used has changed a lot over the last 20 years or so.
Like the example with links (which is one of the only good points he makes in the article I think) I remember back in the 90ies or there abouts it was commonplace for websites to have a 'links' section where whoever was running the site could post likes they thought would also be relevant or interesting to their readership.
This, in fact, was the whole reason that the PageRank algorithm was designed in the way it was, outgoing links were taken as being an 'endorsement' of the site being linked to by the site it was linked from.
Now links are used in a completely different way, like, while people will still have their 'links' section. In many cases sites are set up to generate a ton of out-links to sites in their little network and in turn receive a bunch of in-links from other sites in the same network, thus generating a higher PageRank.
Now is it bad that the way the 'net functions has changed, eh, I don't know. I did like the Wild West feel of the old internet though. Though, I suppose that has sort of moved on to the likes of TOR and stuff now.