Isn't that a bit elistist to say everything changed when more people joined? The point is not the consumers of the Internet but the producers are what changed it - primarily with advertising and walled gardens.
That distinction is in itself a way in which the Internet changed. The Internet used to be to talk about things with other peers, not a conveyor belt from producers to consumers.
The days of the internet for me were when I got stuck, I could ask for help and a programmer would chime in and treat me like an actual human being. "Your doing it correct but in all the wrong ways, try this instead" or "how about you try it this way or hey X language may be a better suited"
That swiftly turned to: "it should be this way and no, stop asking for help". StackOverflow is evidence of this.
By then IRC had turned sterile & grumpy and as someone who's grown up with psychological trauma I was petrified posting on StackOverflow because most responses were "no it's wrong, don't code".
Which particularly is why I don't care about Python. Not sure how it is now but I saw python's community toxic. Maybe it has to be if it's to enter corporate land.
PS: Though I will agree that SO moderation was simultaneously excessively aggressive when it came to subjective or borderline off-topic questions (or worse still, impossible-to-search questions) and remarkably inconsistent.
Language barriers also didn’t help, you had people who could barely speak English asking questions, and unable to understand the answers. Then those people started giving answers too. I wonder if things would have been a little better with today’s improved translation tools.
"How can I read a file and split the line obtaining a pipe symbol and send it via a socket server" but the angst of "WHY DO DO YOU WANT TO DO THAT", "You shouldn't do that in X-Lang" ... well maybe because I wish to execute commands on the socket server when based on the value of the pipe.
[lindex [split $variable "|" 1]A) They're not just "consumers"; people produce a huge percentage of the content, via facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc
B) The people of a society define its culture. When you change the people, you change the culture
When I joined, nobody was there because they had to be. Including vendors. That's a totally different vibe than now. There was also excitement and optimism of something new, and i was youthful.
"The change I was part of when I was between the ages of 15 to 25 was the best!"
"The change of the next generation that wasn't recognizably my peer group was bad and ruined everything :("
The GP might be elitist with their view but it’s still just as valid opinion as the others shared.
I believe the economic forces were more or less irresistible. In other words, if the current powers that be had behaved more ethically according to early internet norms, the only thing that would be different is they would have lost in the market and been supplanted by equivalent mass consumer oriented companies pursuing the same enshittification cycle we dislike.
I don't think this can change unless there is a cultural shift away from worshipping at the altar of raw capitalism and GDP at the expense of everything else. The way our political discourse and regulatory capture have evolved recently I am not super optimistic, though I do think the mass hatred of AI across political lines does offer a glimmer of hope.