> Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic.

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.