This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
Yes there was. Go to archive.org and check for yourself.
> The commercial internet is a trillion times bigger than anything that came before and services billions of users around the world, many for free, paid for by ads.
Bigger doesn't mean better. The web is now flooded with malicious and manipulative content. The ads pay for that content, while taxpayers and consumers pay for the infrastructure that actually makes the Internet possible. Ads pay to keep the web centralized, they don't pay for what makes the web possible.
> This is a tired old myth that everything was somehow better in the good old days but that's all it is.
There is indeed, but notice that I did not say that "everything was somehow better in the good old days". I made a very specific comment about a very specific topic. My comment: there was plenty of quality content on the web before ads arrived. Ads made the web worse. Argue against this if you like, but not about things I did not claim.
That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true, and advertising pays for much of it. You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
It is the medium that makes the ads possible, and it is payed by you and me.
> We're talking about content, and ads are the subsidy that lets billions consume for free.
And I have been telling you every step of the way that there was good content before the ads arrived.
> That there's more content for more people across more channels is objectively true,
That is hardly surprising. There was no moment in the history of the web when the total amount of content available was not increasing. This was already the case before the ads.
Did it grown more than it would have without ads? Maybe. Is it better? I don't think so.
> and advertising pays for much of it.
And yet here you are, consuming content that someone created for free (me) in a platform without ads (Hacker News). So it doesn't pay for all of it, and even you, at least sometimes, seem to prefer the non-ad-funded corner.
> You seem to be conflating ad UX with economics.
Sorry, I have no idea what you mean by this.
Literally the only site that is better now than back then is YouTube with an ad-blocker.
Everything else has deteriorated: Google (search) is worse, Ebay is worse, Amazon is worse, banking sites are worse.
Heck, even Java stock tickers from 2000 were better than now.
The art of presenting information in a meaningful way has been lost entirely.