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> The internet was built on people writing massive forums posts about completely stripping down Kawasaki motorbike engines You're skipping the birth of the internet and are talking about the teenage years. I was alive and on the internet in the very early 90s. Academics and Hobbyists created the barebones of the internet, sure, sorta. But the internet didn't explode in popularity until people started making money off it. That's when the 90s internet bubble started to form. Even before the internet, services like Prodigy, Compuserve and AOL were here, quite literally being the internet. There were local BBSs and then there were big, national BBSs like Prodigy and Compuserve. They were little internets onto themselves, and produced content themselves. At the time, they were more popular than the web itself, because the content today simply didn't exist like it did back then. No google, No wikipedia, forums were still in their infancy, etc. > I totally and utterly refute your statement. The world came to the internet for the content that people made for free Wrong. You most certainly weren't on the internet back then if you're going to stand behind that statement because it's 100% false. It's simply too complex for that statement to hold true. Everything from internet speeds to cheap computers played a much larger part -- the internet sucked back in the mid 90s because it took 3 minutes to load up a simple (non animated) gif file. Videos? Hah! It would take you a week to download a 15 minute clip. Due to these issues, people got fed up or were impatient and it delayed adoption. > Quality online content will not vanish if online advertising fails, because quality online content is posted by people who first and foremost /want to post content/. That's great in some naive ideological fantasy, but it ignores a little something called human nature, more specifically, greed and/or the need to put food on the table. People will want to make money off their work and people will create content for money. Just because some people will create content for free doesn't mean they constitute a majority, or even a minority. |
I was on the Internet back them and I certainly came for the freely published content... So it's not 100% false.