The Gilded Age of (Unpaid) Internet Writing

If that was the gilded age, who were the robber barons? Execs at AOL and CompuServe? And these writers were working long hours in dreadful conditions for their corporate overlords?

No. A gilded age is not the same as a golden age. And I think the author meant golden age.

As for the rest of it . . . corporate hipster (and wivey leaguer[1]), yikes! The newly democratized free expression of the 90s was in weblogs you controlled yourself, not in webzines that someone else owned.

[1] Granted, Vassar has been coed since the 60s. The point is that it's awfully elite schooling for a writer for webzines in the 90s.

I truly (and I think about this daily) miss the days when content you could search for and find was primarily written by people who knew their stuff, not marketing shills. I don’t feel that the web is a reliable source of learning material anymore, and so it has failed as a medium.