So exactly when was this? Even Geocities was full of punch the monkey ads and the web was inundated with X10 pop under ads.

Right before the web became a thing, Usenet was starting to become inundated with spam

>If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.

Unfortunately, music lyrics are protected by copyrights so your site of King Crimson lyrics would not be authorized unless you paid for a license. The music publisher may not expend the effort to have a lawyer send you a "Cease & Desist" letter to make you take it down because your personal website is small fish but they wouldn't ignore a popular website that tried to show all lyrics for free with no ads.

The legitimate ongoing licensing costs from Gracenote/Lyricfind for their catalogs of millions of song lyrics will cost significantly more than the hosting bill. The cost is beyond the resources of typical hobbyists who like to share information for free.

EDIT: I have no idea what the downvotes are about. If you think my information about lyrics licensing is incorrect, explain why. Several decades ago, volunteers were sharing guitar tabs for free on the internet and that also got shut down by the music publishers because of copyright violations. Previous comment about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24598821

we lost the original vibe of the Internet.

The signal (fan sites) to noise (sites focusing on revenue) ratio is way off today. The issues are that ad revenue generating sites are too plentiful, in some cases they are generated by code and they are more highly placed in search engine results. SEO and procedurally created content is where we lost the way (I think the lure of getting rich as a social media influencer or streamer further moved us away).

I was looking for discussion around a brand new album last night (not King Crimson related...), like from an internet forum, reddit, even a review, but the first few pages of search results were all storefronts selling/streaming it, PR (not even reviews) or AI generated pages about the artist. The stuff I was looking for existed, but I only found it after adding "reddit" to the search terms. I was hoping to find a new forum similar to this one focused on that kind of music. Reddit is not ad free, but at least it has a raison d'etre beyond advertising...

So, it's harder to find fan sites, and I'm sure fan site maintainers are less motivated to keep up for this reason (a more popular site is probably more fun to maintain). At least compare this to FOSS projects. I think findability is easier for those, and the popular ones are reasonably well maintained.

Yes, and yet we would do well to distinguish hobbies from necessities, like quality journalism. Not saying there's an easy fix, but there better be one.

> If I loved King Crimson, I might create a site expressing that love and also host lyrics to their songs. Not to generate ad revenue. Not with any expectation of being reimbursed for hosting costs. I did it because it was fun and because sharing knowledge felt like the point.

Anyone can still do this today (I don’t know the legalities of publishing copyrighted lyrics though). Of course, the proportion of people who wanted to do that was much higher in previous decades.

But we also spend much more time and bandwidth today than decades ago, so maybe it just wasn’t feasible to expect that much quality content from volunteers to keep flowing.

All the streaming apps have this feature, though?

I mean there kind of is: https://lrclib.net/

... and many other sins.

I go to YouTube and see a lot of things that make me question the narrative that this is an advanced system that elicits user preferences, makes markets clear, allows competitors to enter the market, etc.

The first ad I see if is for Chrome. Well I'm already using Chrome because sometimes Youtube punishes me for using Firefox. So the message is "lights are on and nobody is home", I mean, they can see the user agent and probably have deeper analysis that would indicate I'm not faking it.

Next I get a sequence of three obvious scam ads. Trying to provoke the fear of dementia in elderly people unless you use this "one weird trick" or a crypto scam or something that's obviously a scam but no way I am going to sit through 45 minutes of droning to know what the punch line is.

Then there are the saturation ads for things like car insurance that are always over-advertised because nobody wants to buy them (people wouldn't buy insurance at all if they didn't get it from their employer, or had to get it to drive a car or get a mortgage, etc.) These have internalized the form of the scam ads because they're surrounded by them.

Finally after maybe 20 ads I see something I might want and think "do I send them an email that says I'm afraid they're a scam because they're advertising in a place soaked with scams, they've incorporated so many superficial characteristics of scams and that they should reconsider their advertising spend?"

I know the numbers say Google and Facebook are making money hand over fist but on the ground my perception is that it looks like a Potemkin Village that is trying to fool investors into thinking there is a vibrant "advertising economy" when it is really a vast wasteland like daytime TV where it is all about medicare fraud and personal injury lawyers.