[mjevans]

Ads, and forced conversions.

The Internet used to be mostly hobbyists and 'true believer' types who ran human scale sites and web forums, who managed small communities of the like minded that anyone could view from the side and join or shy away from if they wanted.

Now everything is trying to be a walled garden that locks users and content inside, so both the content and the users are monetized. Mostly by the platforms that try to man in the middle the town square for lack of a good free community commons.

[kazinator]

Before the Internet was for hobbyists, it was only for professionals working at companies and institutions hooked up to it.

The window of time between the World Wide Web coming into existence on the Internet, and that Web becoming widely commercialized, was only a handful of years.

I was already doing contract work in 1994 for a pay-per-click commercial website dispensing information about mining sites and stocks around the world. (What back end? I modified CERN httpd's logging routines to look up the page in a hash table of paid content, and log extra information about that. Then a log parsing program would import the data into a billing system.)