I'm at a juncture in my career where I'm asking what could really motivate me to do anything that I really feel is worth doing in tech. In my earlier years I remember using both CompuServe and Prodigy. I'm not sure if it just hindsight colored by nostalgia, but I yern for the feeling I had as a young teenager when I could explore a quirky and curated world of information.

I'm starting to think that all this AI stuff has finally pushed the ads-based Internet past its tipping point.

I feel I could be motivated to work on a walled garden with moderation paid for by subscription fees. What would it be worth to you to have an entirely new online experience free of all the enshittification of the past 15 years?

Personally, I pay for Kagi just to have a small taste of what that could be like. But what if not just the search engine, but also all the sites be funded entirely by a subscription fee paid to the service profider? What if privacy could be a foremost feature of that world? What if advertising and astroturfing were strictly forbidden, and human authors would have to be vetted by other humans to be allowed a place in this world? "This content is Certified ads- and AI-Free(tm)."

I really don't know how well something like that would turn out in 2024, but I feel I wouldn't be alone in wanting to give it a try.