[II2II]

> Free does not scale

No disagreement there, except the early web was not about scale. The sites you visited may have been created by someone as a hobby, a university professor outlining their courses or research, a government funded organization opening up their resources to the public, a non-profit organization providing information to the public or other professionals, or companies providing information and support for their products (in the way they rarely do today).

> people need to eat, pay for rent

Those people were either creating small sites in their spare time, or were paid to work on larger sites by their employer.

There were undoubtedly gaps in the non-commercial web. On the other hand, I'm not sure that commercializing the web filled those gaps. If anything, it is so "loud" that the web of today feels smaller and less diverse than the web of the 1990's.

[toomuchtodo]

I agree there are hobbyists, for lack of a better term, who will always share for free "for the love of the game", passion, whatever you want to call it. Nothing stops them from doing this passion or charity work today, the evidence of that is clear from the content we see daily pass through /new here. That was never really ad driven, nor would it be in the future, and numerous mechanisms remain for them to share this content for free with the world. But that is a small minority of today's Internet and consumption of data, information, and content (imho).

How does HN exist? Wealthy benefactors. Do I appreciate it any less? I do not, I am very grateful. But solutions are needed where a wealthy benefactor has not stepped in or does not exist, a commercial business model is untenable, the government does not or will not fund it, and the scale is beyond a single person spending a few hours a week on it for free.

https://xkcd.com/2347/