I'm probably too nostalgic, but that's what the web used to be... and it was so much better. Most of the content we would lose I wouldn't miss at all. Clickbait

I'm probably too nostalgic, but that's what the web used to be... and it was so much better. Most of the content we would lose I wouldn't miss at all. Clickbait and buzzfeed style sites. Already I'm paying for a lot of sites that actually do reporting, for instance, so I already feel like the content of real value is already for-pay or produced completely for free by enthusiasts and academics. I remember ~2001 or so a lot of the sites I visited were ad supported, but it mostly just made enough to cover hosting costs. At this point hosting costs are so cheap that I don't even think those style of sites would have trouble existing. Most of those sites existed because some people were interested in a hobby or a subject, and would publish news and have bulletin boards and articles and stuff. Sadly those kind of communities don't seem to exist anymore, now those kind of things end up being subreddits or facebook groups and I never feel like those are quite the same, they just don't have the same curation or community feel.