>Because we could read/listen to/watch stuff without paying the people who created it?

I can tell you I wouldn’t be anywhere close to where I am without this, yes.

First because I (/my parents) didn’t have the money, second because of pure geographical access.

I saw movies and shows from countries that would never sell near me, read books that would never be in my country’s libraries, took courses straight from scientists and engineers rather than a thrice translated work…

The barrier of entry was also useful, curiosity is much better fed when you can download a medicine textbook just to check rather than venturing into the library of a university you’re not part of.

That is the one thing the internet did right, spreading culture. It was over when they took boredom from us, that was the big evil.

> Because we could buy stuff without leaving the house?

I'm guessing you were still pretty young/not yet born at the time?

Online shopping didn't just mean "I don't have to leave the house", it opened up a whole world of what was even possible.

Prior to the web if you didn't live in a big city (and less people did then) then your access to books, music, movies was insanely restricted.

I deeply recall how painfully limited my local Sam Goody was, even major "alternative" bands only had partial discographies available. I remember visiting my father's college campus as an early teen and being beyond excited to find a copy of NIN's "halo 1" in a college town record store. True indie music was reserved for kids with cool older siblings that both knew where the stores were and could drive there. In order to watch Dragon Ball Z I had to rely on a friend whose dad was a plumber in NYC and knew where the bootleg stores in China-town were. I got to tag along once and picked up a single random episode of a Gundam series, never to be finished because I could never find another.

Sure it was sort of fun to figure all this stuff out, but at the same time my bookshelf is filled with books that changed my life in various ways I would simply never had been able to find (or even be aware of) in the pre-web days. If you wanted to learn programming in the 90s you had to hope your local Walden books had some good options, and you certainly weren't going to learn Haskell or Lisp. Mine only had books on Excel, so I didn't learn to program until I was older.

Now the fact that American suburbs where a complete cultural wasteland in the 90s might be the bigger issue than the cure which was the web, but nonetheless the early web did make the world of information much bigger.

Yes. The current generation of creatives could not exist as it is without free information and pirated professional software.

For many reasons, but if I had to pick one for brevity: because there was unprecedented access to educational information, allowing anyone to learn about the world and develop skills that would typically have required a university education. Of course, even that has been corrupted, and now while the information still exists it is drowned out by orders of magnitude more misinformation.

That's not to say that the internet in 2000 was without flaws, but I do think on net it was beneficial to humanity.