Everybody used to make content for free in the early 2000s, that's a shallow argument. That's what communities do, they cooperate out of the mutual benefit the

Everybody used to make content for free in the early 2000s, that's a shallow argument. That's what communities do, they cooperate out of the mutual benefit the cooperation achieves. The monetization of content was born out of the ad business model. Someone had to pay the bill of the tools the tech giants were building, not the bill of small content creating communities and individuals. It was, and still is, relatively cheap to run a blog or a forum. Individuals can pay for it, and a couple dozen people can share the upkeep burden of relatively big forums with no issue. Now, however, everybody wants to turn everything into a profit, simply because it's so easy to do it, so "why not?". If you can monetize your own pet dog, your child, the food you eat, why not? And now we're all furbed.