It's been really sad to grow up and watch the cool techie optimism of the 2000's internet get sucked dry by profit motives and left to rot. The change has occur

It's been really sad to grow up and watch the cool techie optimism of the 2000's internet get sucked dry by profit motives and left to rot. The change has occurred pretty much entirely within my adult lifetime (I'm only 27 and I still remember when Google was the cool new thing on the internet). It went from "search engines and the web will usher in a new era of wisdom and democracy" to "useful content is dying at the hands of monetization schemes, and also the internet will be the death of liberal democracy, woe unto us all" in about 15 years.