I disagree with the idea that money is what ruined the internet, to a degree.

What ruined the internet was, quite frankly, non-nerdy people who caused the average intelligence of the internet to massively drop causing everything to be catered to LCD rather than assuming a basic competency.

Yes, everything needing to extract money is part of it but that wouldn't be as offensive if there was still alignment on demographics of the internet; nerds, geeks, and various outcasts.

The solution to this is community and admin self-policing. HN has accomplished this by having community buy-in that we aren't Reddit so any Reddit-esque jokes or low quality replies quite immediately get removed causing the behavior to get trained out of newbs.