The internet can still be joyful as long as you make the necessary effort to avoid algorithmic content.
Then came ubiquitous advertising. And affiliate links. And paid content. Suddenly every website was a potential moneymaker. SEO became a thing, so we could drive more traffic and increase ad revenue. Back in the early 2000s, I got weekly emails from ad companies offering money to inject banners on my websites.
Free web hosting that's as easy as Geocities was is hard to find these days. But web hosting has become dirt cheap (so cheap that I shut down my hosting business, as I can't compete on price, and no one cares about service).
I wish websites could go back to being labours of love, rather than being side hustles.
IMO, monetization was never the real problem. Everybody online was interested in making money even back in the early 2000s: there were ads, spam, commerce, and get-rich-quick schemes and everything way back then too.
I think the main issue is that average IQs online have gone down dramatically.
In the late 90s and early 2000s, using a computer to participate in some online community took the slightest bit of intellect: you had to build or setup a computer and access the Internet, which was a bit harder back then. This filter ensured that a far greater percentage of everybody online was at least of average or higher intelligence. That's it. That's the simple explanation.
Today, every idiot out there has a phone in their pocket to mess up everything joyful. Everything good has to cater to this least common denominator: this is why everything sucks.
Consider the reason that HackerNews is a pleasant community to use: IMO it isn't because it lacks extreme monetization, it's because the average person here is smarter than what you'd see on other websites.
It's been said ad nauseam but the sort of things that people would put on a geocities page (pictures, political diatribes, even things like fan pages) has moved to social media. But even that is not a problem in and of itself. The early days of social media were fun as well.
The thing that killed the internet IMO is smartphones. The internet was better when it was a "place" (cyberspace!) that you consciously had to take time to visit. You sat down, you "got on the internet" and then you "left" when you got up. The ubiquitous internet that you carry around at all times, being constantly connected is what created the pervasive advertising that you're talking about because the internet captured more of people's attention which made advertising much, much more lucrative.
Not to mention the fact that it's a content creation device as well. You couldn't take a picture and instantly post it to your geocities page or bang out 288 character brain farts on a whim. Everything was much more deliberate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurence_Canter_and_Martha_Sie...
The dominant culture up until around 96 or so was fun, with a special kind of psychedelic digital weirdness. Then the corporates took over and everything turned beige - as it has been ever since.
But it wasn't just the algorithm. Web 1.0 was ridiculously easy to use. Basic web hosting and email were included in many internet access plans, and almost anyone could put together a site with a text editor.
Now HTML/CSS/JS are a sprawling, impossible monster - way out of the direct reach of most people. The easy site builder apps/payment are too expensive, fees on Etsy etc are extortionate, markets are full of cynically sourced crap, and playing social media games for marketing is a huge time sink.
So the cost of entry is far, far higher than it used to be, and the rewards of do-it-for-fun are basically zero in terms of connecting with others.
It would be great if they exposed their various metrics so third-parties could design their own feed algorithm.