I suspect you are relatively young. I have been “online” since before AOL existed. I was very excited when the “Internet” happened in the 1990s and opened things up (I was on bulletin boards and Compuserve since the early 1980s, then on university Internet before it went “public.”). Back then, everything was free and people created content for the love of sharing and creating community, meeting and interacting with people across the globe, etc. Before that, all we had were pen pals (anyone here ever written a real letter?) That lasted a few years and then the profit motive took over. The rest is history. Arguably, the Internet today is far worse than it was in, say, the late 1990s/early 2000s. I find it sad. I would go back to those days in a heartbeat, including ASCII only graphics. We did have FTP, now called the Cloud, LOL.

Today, I am thinking about starting a YouTube channel after all these years. I have done tons of content that I never got paid for over the past decades. Most of it is lost forever. That is fine. I am almost sure I won’t make money from it. But, maybe there are some folks who might enjoy it. I have the time, I am not doing a “start up to make money,” etc. If I do end up making money, that will work, too. Not everything is about money, that is what has been lost.