I first found Rinkworks when I was 11 or 12, and am 25 now. I visited the site for the first time in all those years just earlier this week (and have been happily playing Murkon's Refuge). I just got a hankering in the middle of the night for the internet I remembered from ~2006.

I'm actually surprised to see that the Reddit of 2009 doesn't, in my opinion, look that different from the Reddit of 2020. Sure, the front page no longer quite looks like that, but I imagine plenty of people's heavily curated personal front pages do. Although maybe the move towards personalizing everybody's view of everything may have had something to do with the things you all are pointing out.

One of the places that comes to mind where I see people putting in immense amounts of unpaid, sustained effort into a corner of the internet out of love and passion is in fanfiction. People write absolute epics, edit each others' work, maintain websites, donate money... just to contribute.

I wonder if the attitude towards writing is changing. Do people express their love and passion for things in other ways than writing text? Is writing text seen more as labor than something that is just enjoyable for its own sake or for its ability to let you contribute to some conversation?