The Internet used to be mostly hobbyists and 'true believer' types who ran human scale sites and web forums, who managed small communities of the like minded that anyone could view from the side and join or shy away from if they wanted.
Now everything is trying to be a walled garden that locks users and content inside, so both the content and the users are monetized. Mostly by the platforms that try to man in the middle the town square for lack of a good free community commons.
The window of time between the World Wide Web coming into existence on the Internet, and that Web becoming widely commercialized, was only a handful of years.
I was already doing contract work in 1994 for a pay-per-click commercial website dispensing information about mining sites and stocks around the world. (What back end? I modified CERN httpd's logging routines to look up the page in a hash table of paid content, and log extra information about that. Then a log parsing program would import the data into a billing system.)
Interesting stuff is infinitely fragmented, also.
I like my interesting stuff, and other people's interesting stuff is ... uninteresting.
If the difficulty of finding interesting stuff is D, but I'm actually only interested in 0.1% of the interesting stuff, then the difficulty I perceive is 1000D.
The advent of HTTPS was a fall from grace, as reality set in. Even if most people are nice enough, a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump.
The Edenic experience can be reborn in a walled garden sort of way. But Eden cannot survive real anonymity.
The digital gardens of the early internet were bound to get paved over as it scaled from millions to billions of users. Being a consumer was easier and simpler, and frankly, far better connected via centralized social-network hub sites.
We can blame outside powers and forced that be. But the path through doesn't really hinge on that. Can we create a powerful culture that has its own will and liberty, that is interested & active in shaping it's way forward? The internet for a while was a magnet for seekers, for people interested in participating in these optimization loops. If we can create the conditions where people can see empowerment, where people can and do connect I'm new and interesting ways, if we make and show off malleable systems we tune and adjust and shape to ourselves, I still believe we can get back on a path of the internet being a way to amplify the better "man the toolmaker" instincts. Opening the door, letting folks peer under the hood & improve, via coding or via other higher order systems, that can culturate & improve people... That's how we respond to the long Eternal September crisis of the digital.
