alt Hacker News> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.
Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades.
But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
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>> Anyone can still do this today
But no-one would ever find it - which might be fine - and that seems like a waste.
>> to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.
This is a big change in perspective & expectation. The original web was not volunteers doing work for others, but humans voluntarily doing work to share with others.
I was trying to use a grain/chaff analogy to respond to your post, but I think there were just less crops in the old days. For the sites (crops) that were there, you had a lot more healthy ones. As spam and low-quality sites proliferated, the signal->noise ratio of sites got completely out-of-balance.
But in search results, you only find the sites that game the system to maximize their profits, while millions of other well-meaning sites get little to no traffic, and eventually people lose interest in maintaining an online presence. They move toward big silos like Instagram, platforms that just use their content to attract more ads.
Ads do break the internet, or let's say, fundamentally change the model of how it works to the detriment of most people