[necovek]

A transit system has a different cost and is actually paid for by majority of users: the fact that few abuse it is not going to break it (as long as we keep it immoral to do so — note that there may be valid reasons to do it, when someone is in some sort of urgency and eg. ticketing machine is overcrowded or broken: it's not on us to judge even if we might be right 99% of the time).

Here, we are talking about things where it takes volunteer work to keep a thing you want going — I do not even want to imagine a world where a board game night is organized by a paid pro instead of the enthusiast, even if a status quo means that there is always an assymetry between hosts doing most work and guests never hosting themselves (maybe they do not have a big enough space though — they can still volunteer to help though).

I've realized this in high school and uni and started making conscious effort to sometimes do the social fabric things even when I did not feel like it, in order to continue benefiting from the social engagement.

[inigyou]

This is, to some extent, precisely what happened to most of the internet. Things run for passion withered away; things run for profit remained. New people grew up surrounded by only for-profit things, and believed that was just the way things were supposed to work. They've never seen a personal website.

When I was 5 or 6 my dad helped me make a web page about the Star Wars movie I just saw and didn't really understand but I thought the pod racers were cool. Apparently our ISP came with a little bit of web space. That doesn't happen any more. You don't even get Usenet.

[Anamon]

I feel that very much.

The web I grew up with was clearly built by regular people, for fun, and anyone browsing it knew that they could build on it, too, whether they were interested to or not.

Today's mainstream impression of the web is that it's a corporate "content" service like TV or Spotify, with some of them offering the cool additional feature of allowing some limited user contributions.

The old idea of the web ruled. The new idea is garbage.