alt Hacker NewsThis is most definitely wrong. People volunteer and crowdsource all the time, driven by ideals. And the async nature of the web will only make such projects stronger. There's OpenStreetMap, TV Tropes, fandom wikis, movie dbs, and a thousand others with no sign of stopping.
But the future will raise the bar. Perhaps we'll see wiki of wikis, or something else getting the web closer to truly semantic knowledge.
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However, it's now operationally much harder to make sure that the contributors actually are humans.
It’s the infinite value extraction hustle that’s killing the fun of projects.
I used to contribute to [X] project because it felt good to make something, but realizing that someone is getting a dollar on the back of my work that I am not is just not worth it.
The real test is the creation rate for those projects.
From your list, I think most were started 15-20+ years ago[1] so your argument isn't contradicting the original point.
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[1] OSM, Fandom and TV Tropes were started 22 years ago. Wikipedia itself was started 25 years ago.
Many longtime OSM mappers have sensed that there has been some decline in interest and a risk to the long-term future of the project as a truly amateur-enthusiast phenomenon. Causes include: younger generations raised on corporate platforms and their phone apps are less aware of non-corporate alternatives, and might even be suspicious of libre and altruistic movements (this is a concern in Free Software circles, too); as the map got filled in, there were fewer obvious blanks that struck a total newbie as a place he/she could contribute; corporations got onboard both as OSM users and stakeholders, and then some idealistic anti-capitalistic people have asked why they should contribute if the map can benefit corps, too, etc.