In a better world the internet would run on the free software and open source mentality and value free speech.
Seems at least the Western internet is run more and more by "diversity" hires and soys who oppose such ideals.
Computers and the Internet have been steadily spiralling down since the 90s, when microcomputers were widely adopted and governments introduced computer literacy courses. Enshittification is a natural consequence of computer systems becoming more widely available, more widely used, and more widely monetised. When computers were sufficiently rare that corporations could afford a few minis at most, only the people truly fascinated with the subject would get involved, and the personalities at campuses like MIT AI Lab created a whole subculture about using computers to do fun and interesting things rather than just figuring out how to make money from them. As that diffused, the "hacker ethos" retreated into organisations like GNU, where isolation and bitterness was free to corrupt them and bring them further away from the rest of the IT industry, rather than making their thought a fundamental part of the computer user mindset.
Just to compare, the early timesharing system Multics was developed primarily by corporations, specifically GE and Bell. The result was strict access control, strict user hierarchy, and strict (for the time) security. That would become a core part of timesharing systems, which were promptly introduced wherevery they could be because it makes better use of the limited resources available. Timesharing basically just means "multiple users simultaneously", but by implication that also means "multiple programs simultaneously", ie timesharing means multitasking. When MIT students were introduced to their new Multics-running computer, they threw a fit and developed their own counterpart, ITS, which had just about zero security. Anyone with a terminal could dial them and log on, even without a user account. The result was a long list of important technical achievements, as well as several productivity softwares and games that would quickly become mainstays. Thanks to ITS we got free/open-source software ideology, open design movement (current counterparts would be things like the 3D printer community or github, where projects are publicly available and anyone who wants to can learn from others, or help improve the projects), which when combined with the hypertext movement led directly to wikis (Wikipedia has many issues these days, but the core concept is incredibly important). What did we get out of Multics? Ken Thompson's deep-seated frustrations with the project led him to create UNIX, but "this thing was so shit that both MIT and Bell had to start over from scratch and make something actually usable" isn't high praise.
I actually take some solace in the fact that services like Discord and various social media are subsuming the normie internet. Once the general population are removed from it the web will be a much smaller community, but I think it will be a better one. Right now we just happen to be stuck in that awkward phase in-between, where the two sides are still forced to mingle.
