I think you're completely right, btw. After AOL, it only took a few years for websites to become rapidly Flash-based. It looks like we're going back to that again (not Flash, but same thing - black boxed).

I work for an academic nonprofit. Asking to spend any money is like pulling teeth, and any purchase I make has to go through many layers of bureaucracy who don't understand or care what I do and have no incentive to make my life easier. I don't want to leave Github, but now I have to, because I just won't get the approval to spend hundreds a year. But I know that's nothing to Bay Area companies, so the rest of us will just go kick rocks or something.

But I don't think the point about the author's personal experience of not "feeling like a girl" proves anything - see "cis by default", or http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/02/18/typical-mind-and-gender.... It's possible that there are people who do feel strongly that their body doesn't match what their mind is telling them, and it's a cause of suffering. As I understand it, it really is all about sex in this case (which makes the author's quip about her "true self not having arthritic knees" irrelevant).

The idea of "flamebait" has also completely disappeared, and we've lost the ability to roll our eyes at it.

Well, no, not exactly. It's a subtle distinction, but what it's actually ranking is how well that school exceeds expectations, not best outcomes. This is not necessarily a list that will give a student the best school to go to, but rather (what it says on the tin) a scorecard for how well those schools are doing, given their resources.

The (mostly teenage) audience for Youtube celebrities is massive, and is probably mostly invisible to you if you don't know any kids. I don't know whether they'd be willing to pay for a subscription service, but regardless of whether you think Netflix is higher quality than Youtube, there are many millions of people who get their entertainment mostly just from Youtube.