The web came to be because people could freely express themselves, share their hobbys, interests and works with a global audience. Monetisation played a minor role for a very very long time. I miss that old web.
That web still exists: look at Wikipedia, one of the largest websites, run entirely not-for-profit with the aim of sharing the sum of human knowledge. Nothing stops people from starting not-for-profit websites today and only linking to other not-for-profit websites. Running a website has never been cheaper and search engines are light years ahead of anything that existed then.
They may never be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but that's because the web has grown in audience to people looking for something similar to watching TV, reading newspapers and going to the pub. Those activities will always be more popular than people hacking in a garage, but they can coexist.
The changing audience isn't the biggest reason they're more popular. When people talk about 'stickiness' they're talking about using Dark Patterns of UI and/or using hyperbolic tone (formerly known as Yellow Journalism) to pander or incite, which makes you stick around long after you got the information you thought you came for.
Relatively wholesome sites like Wikipedia can't compete on numbers and hours of visitors because they limit themselves mostly to 'see also', and commentary is split onto another page so you have to choose to see it every time.
At the end of the day it's peoples' choice whether they choose to read sites like that, which pages they like on Facebook, etc. Those sites are popular for the same reason newspapers like the New York Post and the Daily Mail are popular. For as long as newspapers have been published online, those sites have been part of the web. Maybe not BuzzFeed, but sites posting sensationalist content.
Wikipedia is definitely able to compete. It is the 5th most popular website, behind Google and Facebook but ahead of every online tabloid and content farm.
The old web is still there but it is definitely dwarfed by the new web. Search results are gamed, comment sections are spammed, product placement and paid reviews are rampant, fake neutral information websites erode trust. Because there is money involved and access to the Internet is not controlled, some people chasing the dollars ruin the experience for everyone. They keep generating noise in their chase of money so that eventually the old web is impossible to find because most links lead to the new web.
I wish people would start to create more weird and wonderful pages. Pages without styling. Pages with nice styling. Pages with weird styling. But most importantly full of text content, links to friends and weird projects we love, images and videos etc.
dwarfed, ya. and it appears that the "new web" participants engage in legal attacks on, e.g. popular blogs about hacking owned hardware. so, dwarfed and maybe bullied, too.
If you want to write things on a self-hosted static blog in your free time, the hosting costs add up to a few dollars per month for a domain name and (e.g.) a VPS, for something that can scale to thousands of simultaneous readers. This is completely negligible, so I don't think "the bill" is a very important factor.
We already do. The hard disks, the bandwidth, the electricity.
Give me a ready-made virtual machine image [1] pre-configured to share files. I don't care about the protocols, I don't care about super-duper-unbreakable encryption because I won't share or host copyrighted content nor wombat porn.
[1] Not a freaking docker image or whatnot (hi, Mediagoblin!) - if you want it to succeed it has to be dead simple so that mere mortals can do it.
They may never be as popular as Facebook and Twitter, but that's because the web has grown in audience to people looking for something similar to watching TV, reading newspapers and going to the pub. Those activities will always be more popular than people hacking in a garage, but they can coexist.