There was a lot of good stuff available for free, but sometimes only temporarily.

I had internet access starting about 26 or 27 years ago, but it became much more important to me when I was living in the middle of nowhere and began homeschooling. Then it became much more central to my life.

I was on some email lists to support my homeschooling effort. At the time, they were hosted for free by a university. The founder was an IT professional. You kind of had to be. There wasn't anything plug-and-play, like Yahoo Groups or Google Groups.

I had access to some excellent homeschooling stuff for free via internet, but there wasn't anything like Patreon or tip jars, so they had no way to monetize it.

One handwriting site eventually pulled it's free materials off the internet and began charging consulting fees or something. Some excellent math resource disappeared altogether. The best explanation for faceblindness that I've ever seen is now only available via The Wayback Machine aka The Internet Archive (last I checked).

I did a free homeschooling and parenting site for a bit, but hand coding everything when I'm not a professional programmer was a huge burden and impeded updates. I eventually moved to Word Press and, later, BlogSpot. I post a great deal more content using BlogSpot.

I'm mostly okay with the commercialization of the internet. If you want good content, it takes time, effort and expertise to put that out there. It isn't realistic to expect talented people to provide such for free forever. If you want such, you should be willing to allow them to somehow make money from it.

I still try to provide free resources available to the public while trying to monetize it with tips and patrons. Ads aren't doing so well on the internet generally and seem to be an especially poor fit for much of my writing. I haven't yet figured out how to get adequate income from my own websites, but some people do successfully monetize their work while providing cool stuff available for free to anyone.

I recently had a piece do well on HN in terms of traffic and comments: more than 600 upvotes, more than 300 comments and more than 60k page views.

I'm pleased with that aspect of it, but it didn't result in any money whatsoever for me and I'm on track to be broke by the end of the day tomorrow. HN members complain bitterly about ads and are aggressive about using ad blockers. My experience has been you don't make much ad money from hitting the front page of HN and I would rather get tips and patrons anyway.

I don't know if I did something wrong or if it is a case of "sexism is alive and well, so the world expects me to work for free even if I'm literally starving and they know it" or just what.

People who imagine the internet was better back then or would be better if we could get rid of the corporate influence are people who literally expect everything to somehow magically be high quality, completely and totally free and also be reliably available and trustworthy with no hidden gotcha.

I don't know if I will ever succeed in what I want to do, but it's clear to me that patronage, tips and other forms of monetization make it possible for independent creatives to pursue high minded endeavors without compromising their vision in order to pay the bills. I think that's exactly what folks imagine the internet used to be and maybe was to some degree, minus the implicit expectation of basically slave labor making it happen.

And those things are possible thanks to commercialization of the internet. They would work better if more folks felt like it mattered to pay the people providing high quality independent content instead of bad-mouthing commercialization as if it were the root of all evil.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009