On old internet no one was getting paid. It was a hobbyist community. People doing things because they wanted to and enjoyed it.
On the other hand, I feel like nostalgia blinds us to the fact that tech has always had a commercial side. The only reason the internet became accessible to people outside government and academia in the early 90s was because commercial ISPs came onto the scene. The web became a lot more useful when for-profit companies like Google started indexing it. The computers we used to access the internet were only affordable because of decades of Moore's law driven by the semiconductor, home computing, and video games industries. I don't think the thing we're nostalgic for could have existed without the profit motive.
We also shouldn't take for granted the amount of creativity enabled by modern platforms. We might be nostalgic for hobbyists making their own websites and chatting on IRC. But today we have orders of magnitude more hobbyists creating videos on YouTube and collaborating on Discord. Platforms like Patreon make it possible for people to turn their hobby into a career by connecting directly with their audience. Every aspiring game developer can make a video game in Unity and publish it on Steam. I can choose any topic I want to learn about and watch free lectures from experts at MIT and Stanford, or find high quality videos made by the most interested and dedicated amateurs. None of this existed 20 years ago.
And it doesn't have any of the privacy downsides that the Internet has. You can do anything you want with it, total freedom.
No more law enforcement or intelligence agencies being able to monitor your every move. So you could say it's way better even than the old Internet.
Don't get too complacent. LE agencies already know this and all of that can still be surveilled, just not through passive intercept.
This is actually the epoch I trust the least. We've had decades to refine spyware and condition people to install random binary blobs to do most anything. Auto-update and new ownership break provenance. Netherlands recently made it legal for police to hack anyone given probable cause.
AI isn't safe or private unless it's air-gapped. I suggest you start figuring that one out while you still have time.
Of course the risk of targeted surveillance still exists, and nothing is going to stop a hidden camera from being placed in your home.
But in most cases there would be no reason to ever place the average person under such surveillance. So the bulk mass surveillance of the population would be hindered. And they won't be able to persecute people for reading or viewing certain things anymore. So that puts an end to the morality policing that has been enabled by the Internet.
EDIT: Far lower on average, of course. Please don't fixate on pedantry. The point is self-evident and still stands. Quality and quantity is correlated with the amount of time you can spend on it.
A lot of hobby projects end up being way better than corporate stuff because they're made with passion instead of by cynical grifters trying to squeeze every cent of ad revenue out of users. Compare something like the nearly entirely ad-free UESP Wiki[0] to the ad-laden dogshit Elder Scrolls Fandom[1], which would be even worse had it not just scraped info from the UESP Wiki.
One is a labor of love, the other is a labor of SEO specialists monetizing your eyeballs the best they can, and it shows.
[0] https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Main_Page [1] https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/The_Elder_Scrolls_Wiki
Hard disagree with this conclusion. Doing something full time does not mean that it will be high quality nor high quantity. Nor does not doing something full time mean that someone will not produce high quality in high quanity. Lots of great things are the product of people doing things in their free time.
Who is likely to be the better piano player, the accountant practicing 5 hours a week, or the concert pianist practicing 30 hours a week?
This is totally a market-driven perspective, expecting quantity and quality linked to full-time work.
Not everyone aims to monetize or dedicate themselves full-time to their online interests. Pursuits can be purely for enjoyment. It's okay if they suck sometimes. Not everything must cater to consumer or market demands, though that approach is valid too.