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Ah, so what would the Internet look like if it were built by altruistic, honest people. Sadly, I must be really jaded an cynical because that’s so hard for me to envision.
Commercial interests were always exploiting resources within their spheres of influence, even before the Internet. As technology improved and new pathways emerged, they ran full speed ahead.
Your example of a news site that didn’t push their algorithms never existed. Even pre-Internet, when news was printed, every newspaper had a certain slant. In New York City—back in the 70s—there were four major papers, NY Times, Wall St Journal, NY Post, Daily News. They all had their biases.
But the one thing they couldn’t do was collect user data. Ads were static and we had a choice to either read or ignore it.
As I’m typing and doing this brain dump—it’s 1:18am, why am I not asleep—I’ve come to realize that the thing I hate most about the current state of the Internet is the vast collection of user data how companies are mining and exploiting it. If we could stop it, I would be fine with most everything else.