>but the internet back then was really barren

The internet back then was a forest into which you couldn't really see, you just went dumpster diving and it was an adventure.

Today's internet is barren, with most content centered around Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Youtube, and various commercial propaganda campaign sites known colloquially as journalism. That is a fucking desert, a wasteland.

I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies of others (flash games is a good example of how many different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to it).

And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery.

And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).

>(flash games

That was not the old internet but already the current one.

That seems like a real romanticization of the early internet - comparing, essentially, Geocities to a forest and simultaneously calling the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack, not 'influencer' brands on IG) a "fucking desert, a wasteland" seems sort of disingenuous.

Sure, if you never leave FB or Reddit, you're not going to see a ton of diversity. But it's still all there if you can get more than a page into search results, or put in literally the exact same level of effort you used to have to put in when AltaVista and Lycos were out giving horrendous search results.

Even on Reddit, if you spend your time on what used to be the defaults versus finding the niche subs, you're going to have a vastly different understanding of forest/wasteland.

>the plethora of content-creator sites available today (sites like Substack,

They all exhibit a tremendous level of "likethink" bubbling, I find everyone on a given platform to be more or less the same spewing the same crap over and over again.

Contrast Geocities, where you could find everyone and everything imaginable, short of straight up illegal stuff.

* * *

Charging for digital content is (or at least should be) about recouping the cost it took to make it, not the (near-zero) cost to distribute it.

And at scale, the cost ceases to be remotely near zero. Netflix would implode rapidly without income even if they stopped producing content.

Netflix never would have existed to begin with in a world without DRM-loaded media.

(The streaming platform, that is, not the original movies-in-your-mailbox service)

> remotely near zero

That sounds like an oxymoron ;), had to take a double-take when reading.

There are other methods to recoup the cost that actually hand something of tangible value to the customer (the physical mediums I mentioned, for example.) Handing over a digital asset for the same price, and then lambasting those who choose to distribute it freely, is 100% the shittiest way to do it.

It's pretty obvious that media companies are not ok with simply recouping cost plus a reasonable margin but instead all try for a recurring income stream with little recurrent effort to earn it. No amount of profit is enough if more can be had and with the current copyright regime they can legally get away with it too. Plenty of old games are still sold at prices way above zero even when the companies that originally made them have long since stopped existing. So no, digital content is not priced around recouping costs but around maximising profit.

And going back to the original topic, a lot of advertising infested sites on the web still have their content created for free by users and those profiting from the advertisement are merely the middlemen that handle the distribution.