[nullfern]

I disagree with the idea that money is what ruined the internet, to a degree.

What ruined the internet was, quite frankly, non-nerdy people who caused the average intelligence of the internet to massively drop causing everything to be catered to LCD rather than assuming a basic competency.

Yes, everything needing to extract money is part of it but that wouldn't be as offensive if there was still alignment on demographics of the internet; nerds, geeks, and various outcasts.

The solution to this is community and admin self-policing. HN has accomplished this by having community buy-in that we aren't Reddit so any Reddit-esque jokes or low quality replies quite immediately get removed causing the behavior to get trained out of newbs.

[harrisoned]

In the late 2000's/early 2010's that started to pick up where i live, and it was referenced (even by the government itself with it's social programs) as 'digital inclusion', where technology products where subsidized and made more accessible (dumbed down) to the general public, for the reason you mentioned on your third paragraph.

While this was in a time when PCs where the main and only thing for most to access the internet, in my opinion this problem really took shape as smartphones got popular. They where shaped to adapt to a low-level of tech literacy, and lock you in instead of actually providing knowledge to the user. Facebook then went in, and then Whatsapp. Whatsapp was a fun one because carriers made it free of charge, the push to the masses was insane, and nowadays you are questioned and looked at weird if you say you don't have a Whatsapp account.

That trend is what broke most of the social interactions and services on the internet for me.