When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career

When lamenting the "old Internet", a lot of people forget that the vast majority of the people creating content on it were gainfully employed with strong career security. Meaning that they didn't need to make money from their hobbyist online projects, so they didn't need to monetize it. People struggling to pay the bills couldn't afford to be on the old Web. There were as many (or more) desperately poor people in the world 30 years ago, but they were too poor to get online at all. The needed hardware and service were expensive, and online stuff was unimportant to everyday life. So the early Web was dominated by university students and people with middle class careers at established institutions. Today it's a lot less expensive and a lot more universal to communicate electronically. Many desperate scrabblers now use electronic communications in hopes of making money -- whether it's offshore scammers trying to defraud American retirees or "mom bloggers" enticing you to click on their unoriginal and unneeded "awesome diaper brands" article. In absolute terms there are still a lot of people who don't need to make money from writing and therefore write things that are as interesting and commercially unmotivated as the best of the 1990s Web. A couple of examples that frequently show up on HN: Ken Shirriff's blog https://www.righto.com/ https://www.righto.com/ Daniel Lemire's blog https://lemire.me/blog/ https://lemire.me/blog/ There are also some bloggers and substack writers who do get income from writing, but write about topics that are sufficiently far removed from product placement that their writings remain lucid, engaging, and untainted by desperation. A couple of examples: Bret Devereaux's blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" https://acoup.blog/ https://acoup.blog/ Hannah Ritchie's substack "Sustainability by numbers" https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/about There's still more good writing published on the Web than there are hours in the day to read it all. The thing that's harder now than in the 1990s is filtering out the commercially motivated writing. That's one of the things that keeps bringing me back to HN -- discovering interesting writers who aren't making "content" as a substrate for ads/promotions. (And yes, there's a lot of commercially motivated content here too, but that's not the part that keeps bringing me back.)