I was thinking the other day that I liked the web better when it was just people who were passionate or nerdy running a website. It wasn’t about ad revenue.

Maybe it’ll be better this way.

Are those passionate/nerdy people still running niche websites? A search engine that prioritizes that kind of content would be great.

Back Then (tm) you didn't have to fear getting hacked all the fucking time. Shodan didn't exist, Metasploit was in its infancy, you needed to know where to look to buy DDoS and even then, half the offerings were scams themselves. The biggest threat was people abusing your SMTP server.

Today? Run just a plain Apache without a domain name, just a plain old IPv4 and listen on ports 80/443. In seconds you'll get hit by a barrage of exploit attempts, scanners, god knows what. And manage to get something successful, you'll get a few emails that say "pay us X dollars in BTC and we'll leave you alone", and if not you'll get booted off the net if you don't hide behind Cloudflare.

Discovery is also not a thing any more. The old "rings" have long since passed, RSS feeds went down the drain with Google Reader (IMHO, that decision effectively killed off the blogosphere), and Google Search got completely poisoned with SEO.

The Internet has become the Wild West. Law makers have begun to notice but unfortunately they're so utterly braindead that fierce opposition to their regulation attempts is the only choice possible, so nothing happens. Rinse and repeat.