I think the thing I miss most about the old internet was the fact that many people just produced things without worrying about getting paid all the time. Websites were basic but fun, people uploaded funny videos just for laughs, and sites like Reddit were hardly heard of.

It's a store where there's a pickpocket in every aisle, all the products are cheap fakes and the registers are programmed to cheat.

The social contract was that everyone was a custodian of that library. That's how we got Wikipedia.

Social media and monetization broke that social contract. Another building was constructed beside the library. People were checking out books from the library and selling them at the market.

Now with LLMs, those books are being burnt. There's a trillion dollar giga-sized building next to the derelict library and the fast becoming defunct market that is industrial scale mass producing pulpy books.

Here's what N. M. Klein wrote about the internet all the way back in 1998, likening it to a labyrinth.
I don't say this often, but this text has completely changed the course of my life.
Some choice quotes:

1998 is still a dangerously nascent stage in the Internet, while a trillion dollar nest of dragons sets up shop.
Inside, you have seemingly infinite choice, but practically no way out. In fact, you prefer being trapped a bit. That gives the story some bite. Why enter Happy Imprisonment? Because you slowly catch your breath. You expect to outwit the program.
Pockets of confusion in the system let the player imagine that there are ways to subvert it. It's a Faustian sim-bargain. The player submits to the labyrinth, then pretends to cheat.
Simulating revolt is more fun, and a better investment. [...] But consider what sim-revolt implies as a broader model for public life? We pretend that the labyrinth of the Web makes us free of the global corporate program that builds and owns it. We feel above the swamp of idiotic web sites. We know how to surf. The demon apparatus can't get us. We can dig out of anything. We're never trapped.
Recently, there is talk of voting on the Web. Is a cross between ergonomic fascism and the shopping mall the best frame of mind for making political decisions? Let us not mystify information delivery too much. Despite the services, it is not fundamentally democratic, only the freedom to chat. The server and the search engine are a feudal plantation. They decide for us, when to plant, when to hunt.
The labyrinth is a mood of passivity. It's like saying you're never really trapped in bad traffic. Just because we can subvert the Web by saying nasty things or engaging in cyber-sex in the margins, or downloading information cheaply, does not mean that we are subverting any core reality.

I wish the internet WAS a store. It’s a lavatory these days, full of shit and scribbled texts on the door aiming to rot your brain and to destroy democracy.

I find this blinding so I went and got another screenshot for yas.

Capitalism is a machine that turns all freely accessible public goods into paid products and services.

But hey, look at the GDP rising. Don't you feel richer?

I Walk the corner to the rubble,
That used to be a library, line up to the mind cemetery now,

More like "mob-controlled gambling den" than store.

This is exactly how I feel about the internet: it should've been a reincarnation of the Library of Alexandria, not Wall Street.

Yeah and this is why my friends all have gibbity subscriptions: "its so much easier to find info instead of scrolling through reddit or a ton of google pages that are ads! I set my gibbity up to tell me the weather!"

Jfc people are stupid and I hate everyone and I must scream.

/rant.

I should visit the local library again