[errantspark]

I think there's truth to the nostalgia-goggles view here.

I think the early internet:

- was a more distinctly bounded subset of individuals - now it's closer to a random sampling of humans

- had less "background monetary radiation" so there was far less incentive to make low value content

- content spread mostly by human -> human interaction so the bar for something being shared and consequently your likelyhood of seeing it was set higher

It feels like the signal to noise ratio was significantly better as a combination of those things. This sort of product-shilling was less profitable. Also in general the profitability vector being "people click the buy link" vs "people's continued trust in my expertise" influences the sort of content that's created.