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Comment by dhosek | Hacker News Reader

Every day I find myself thinking more and more that capitalism ruined the internet. The Green Card Lottery usenet spam was the clear indication of where things were going and now everything is Green Card Lottery spam.

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That's the same attitude as "cheap airfares caused too many tourists which ruined my favorite tourist destination". You're unhappy that more people have access to it and wish it was still exclusive to the small group you conveniently belong to. Capitalism is what made the internet available to the general public.

Sometimes gatekeeping is a good thing. I don't mind being gatekept from some areas of life, not everything is for me. Mass tourism absolutely has made some places less pleasant to visit, and more importantly, less pleasant to live in.

> You're unhappy that more people have access to it and wish it was still exclusive to the small group you conveniently belong to.

This is not an argument made in good faith. It's a strawman you've stuffed with suggestive language to make them look petty and intolerant.

They did look petty and intolerant. The explosion of popularity of the internet in the late 1990's was done by capitalism. Only a few privileged people had access to the pre-capitalism academic internet. Additional capitalism also made it interesting to the little people so that it's the hugely popular thing it is today.

It’s not the presence of the general public that ruined the internet, it’s the make-a-buck-at-all-costs attitude generated by capitalism that did it.

The general public are only able and willing to use the internet because of the capitalism! When it was an academic thing, most people didn't care at all, and even if they did, they'd have to have social connections to gain access. Even when consumer ISPs were widespread, internet use was still much smaller than today because it wasn't as engaging without capitalism's social media.

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