You're jumping from describing observable results to a state of mind or motive which you can't observe.
> Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s...
That's all observable fact.
Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining.
I think the more reasonable, less diabolical motive was that the blogs and free hosted sites were largely link farms that no one wanted to visit.
It sucks for the few legitimate pages on those platforms, but when most of the legitimate page is the rare gem in a minefield of automated copies of other blogs, just with SEO links and ads inserted.
It's like a comments section: without moderation or captchas or both, a "thriving local community" on, say, a small town news site can be overwhelmed by automated pharmaceuticals spam. Then the newspaper kills the comment section, not out of any malice towards the original community but because they don't want to deal with the spam.
And yeah, dealing with spam and black hat SEO does take resources. If you (or worse, your chosen blog host) don't keep the weeds down, soon your pasture will be overrun and burned off.
I absolutely agree with you that whether Google is intentionally diabolical or not is up in the air. My reason for quoting Brad there is to succinctly recount a history where Google has been a menace (deliberate or not) to individual blogs and websites. Blog rolls were absolutely a great way to discover new blogs and were hardly “link farms” but were an incredibly valuable resource. (An equivalent to modern friend lists.)
Where I don’t agree with you is in the portrayal of the Web as largely comprised of link farms and “few legitimate pages”. I spend a lot of my time cataloging the hidden corners of the Web and it is mostly individuals working on their personal Web projects. Spam is simple to identify (much more so than ‘clickbait’) and many of the reasons people don’t read personal websites any more isn’t because interesting and mind-blowing projects on the Web are too rare. (I don’t have statistics to back this up, but I feel like they are more common on the Web than on social media.)
> Then the worry was Blogrolls might be considered link farms so they slowly started to be phased out. Then the biggie: when Google deliberately filtered out all the free hosted sites from the SERP’s...
That's all observable fact.
Why? Because they were taking up space in the first 20 organic returns knocking out corporate and commercial sites and the sites likely to become paying customers were complaining.
I think the more reasonable, less diabolical motive was that the blogs and free hosted sites were largely link farms that no one wanted to visit.
It sucks for the few legitimate pages on those platforms, but when most of the legitimate page is the rare gem in a minefield of automated copies of other blogs, just with SEO links and ads inserted.
It's like a comments section: without moderation or captchas or both, a "thriving local community" on, say, a small town news site can be overwhelmed by automated pharmaceuticals spam. Then the newspaper kills the comment section, not out of any malice towards the original community but because they don't want to deal with the spam.
And yeah, dealing with spam and black hat SEO does take resources. If you (or worse, your chosen blog host) don't keep the weeds down, soon your pasture will be overrun and burned off.