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Comment by bobthechef | Hacker News Reader

"In general the web was at its best decades ago, when people published because they knew things and were internally compelled to share."

What does this mean, "internally compelled"?

If someone is providing systematic reviews of products, it takes time and resources to do so. Why would they do this for free?

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I think there's truth to the nostalgia-goggles view here.

I think the early internet:

- was a more distinctly bounded subset of individuals - now it's closer to a random sampling of humans

- had less "background monetary radiation" so there was far less incentive to make low value content

- content spread mostly by human -> human interaction so the bar for something being shared and consequently your likelyhood of seeing it was set higher

It feels like the signal to noise ratio was significantly better as a combination of those things. This sort of product-shilling was less profitable. Also in general the profitability vector being "people click the buy link" vs "people's continued trust in my expertise" influences the sort of content that's created.

I mean when someone's motivation comes from what they themselves are interested in and their wanting to pass along their knowledge to help others, as opposed to say the external incentive of being financially compensated. I know this seems completely foreign in this age of played out incentives, but such publishing used to be quite common before independent sites were drowned out by webspam. You'd do a search, dig through a few pages of results, and hit upon an information-dense (likely plain text) site of someone thoroughly geeking out about your topic.

I think you're waxing nostalgically about a time that wasn't nearly as good as you think it was. There's orders of magnitudes of more useful information on the internet today than there was decades ago. Yes, it's more often on platforms and not usually personal websites anymore, but there are still plenty of creators doing it out of passion, even if sometimes - but definitely not always - they also have financial incentive as well.

Well I'm definitely remembering many occasions of finding sites that had in-depth technical analysis. And being unable to find such discussion today. There likely is a higher quality of information today (just due to sheer participation), but the stuff that's easy to find by searching is generally quite shallow. If you're lucky you'll get two or three forum threads that mostly address your question.

RIP JohnnyGuru dot com :-(

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