The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic.
There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs.
Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content.
> The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it.
And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
(Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.)
If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.