[hollerith]

I would. I know that because I spent a lot of time on the internet in 1992 and 1993, when the vast majority of internet content was produced by people not expecting any monetary reward.

Today we have the concept of "user-contributed content", which means content produced without expectation of monetary reward, then uploaded to a site operated by an organization with an expectation of monetary reward. In 1992 these for-profit organizations did not exist: the services through which people accessed the content were created and operated without expectation of monetary reward, too.

It was glorious. There are some valuable content and valuable services that weren't produced in 1992 and would not be produced in the future if it became impossible to profit from producing it, so I don't want to remove the profit motive from the internet. But search results from Google (and its competitors) are now almost completely dominated by for-profit actors, and I agree with grandparent that we need a new search engine that essentially specializes in content produced without expectation of monetary reward.

[yesenadam]

> 1992 and 1993, when the vast majority of internet content was produced by people not expecting any monetary reward.

I don't have any figures - that would be interesting - but I guess even today the 'vast majority of internet content' is produced not expecting any monetary reward. It depends how you count the stuff what exact figure you'd arrive at. 99.9% seems closer to what it might be than 50%. Maybe I'm super-wrong about that.

[hollerith]

Good point. The big difference between 1992 and today is the profit-seeking middlemen between the reader and most of the user-contributed content. These middlemen show ads, track people, require people to sign in and force people to shift their attention to the task of getting rid of modal dialogs (e.g., "sign up for our newsletter") before they will display the user-contributed content. They make it hard for the reader to concentrate on the current web page by showing many links to other web pages on the site or on the sites of the middleman's commercial partners. (Even Stack Exchange, named by another comment in this thread as one of the good middlemen, does that.) In contrast, navigating Usenet and the web of the 1990s was a lot more streamlined; to a greater extent than is possible today, a reader could stay focused on the user-contributed content or on his or her reading goal.

Of course there are middlemen today like Hacker News and Wikipedia that pretty much stay out of the reader's way, but they are the middlemen for closer to 0.1% of the user-generated content than 50% of it.

[yesenadam]

Very graceful disagreeing, thank you! I appreciate it. I have a book called Talking Philosophy that says that when a philosopher at Oxford wishes to express disagreement they say "Quite. But at the same time...", and that one in Sydney says "Bullshit!" p.s. I'm in Sydney :-)