> Three of those four URLs are .edu, and if you look at ../ in the other one, it says it's a college project. The web needed no advertising or tracking or marketing because basically everyone on the web was an academic.
That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic.
There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs.
Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content.
> The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it.
And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.
I think it's interesting to note that (anecdotally, at least) things that are "less practical" attract far more in-depth SO answers than those that are more "useful in the real world" (insert connection to capitalism) - Haskell/"help me push this into the typesystem" questions tend to attract very well-thought-out answers oftentimes, and usually multiple answers at different levels of abstraction.
(Not that I'm discounting things like the excellent low-level questions on things like cache misses/alignment/"why are sorted lists faster to process", but I think they're rarer.)
If anyone here knows their way around the StackOverflow API and has some time, I think it could lead to an interesting couple of hours.
The issue is that there's more and more information put online by someone wanting to get something out of it - and for the absolute minority who are putting stuff up without expectation of direct return, it's easier to use a proprietary service than learn HTML.
That's simply not true. By the mid-90s academics were already a small minority on the web. The OP's sample links are biased because it's a somewhat academic topic.
There was plenty of free and cheap hosting around back then, and for those types of pages bare-bones shared hosting works just fine. For the longest time I paid about $60 a year to host a static site, and it worked great. Hardly the type of money that I needed sell out to advertisers to recoup my costs.
Even GeoCities, while mostly crap, hosted its fair share of useful content.
> The new web is no longer restricted to the ivory tower; you can get a lot better answers on StackOverflow than you could have ever gotten from the old academic internet. But it does have to feed its new master, capitalism.
Nowadays there is technically a lot more information available, but there's significantly more crap to dig through to find it.
And FWIW, I disagree that StackOverflow is "better" than the old style internet. Most StackOverflow answers are shallow - they answer the question, but there's no researching or learning, it's usually just an answer handed to you. It's like the old "teach a man to fish..." thing.