But those websites would have to provide 5.99 a month of value, and many don't.

We used to have "static" banners on sites, that would just loop through a predefined list on every refresh, same for every user, and it worked. Not for millions of revenue, but enough to pay for that phpbb hosting.

The advertisers started with intrusive tracking, and the sites started with putting 50 ads around a maybe paragraph of usable text. They started with the enshittification, and now they have to deal with the consequences.

Nary a month goes by that I don't bemoan the loss of BYTE and Dr Dobbs Journal. WIRED is still hanging on, but it's more of a site where tech warehouses in Shenzhen hawk there latest wares.

There was a time when Boing Boing was a decent little print magazine. And the web site went a decade before turning into... whatever the heck it is now.

And Reality Hackers and Mondo 2000 were "guaranteed unreadable," but they were on the bleeding edge of desktop publishing style and technology.

I'm old enough to remember typing BASIC games from COMPUTE! into my C64 and reading about the latest Star Trek film in Starlog.

I sing the praises of Omni, even though it was clear they were probably snorting a lot of cocaine in their offices.

I can't be the only one who remembers Computer Shopper, but I have to admit it was years before I realized they had a bit of content and were more than just an ad sheet for Micro Center.

PC World wasn't my jam, but I respected the role it played. UnixWorld and Info World were more my thing.

And I even read the stories and articles in Playboy in the 70s. Believe it or not, they had some amazing authors publish stories there.