Just about the other day, I started searching online for resources on how to create a Windows service using c++. I'm not an avid developer on neither technology, but decided to come by the search results in hopes of guidance; which I found plenty still.

However, I did see a trend that has started popping up with paywalls and account-protected content that was not the case in years past.

I've been a web developer since 2004, back when we were called webmasters, and back when the IE was king and making something work in Firefox and IE was tropes of if statements, and close-enough api functions to make the same thing work in both that would get your head spinning out of confusion of what to use when.

I have to confess I learned web dev out of an HTML 1.0 text document I found on a second hand computer I bought, but that pushed me through the rabbit hole of questions and infinite searches through online forums or bulletin boards where thousands of people answered the must random questions about very simple how-to-AJAX questions to much more complex topics and everything in between – all in all with highly detailed how-to's and even free troubleshooting guides when the initial clueless-poster got it wrong and received obscured errors that the free-poster-helper just patiently combed through to help them troubleshoot.

I think that's what made search engines so valuable, and google so prominent. You could search anything and everything and find rich valuable information posted for free by random users who, after all, were just sharing their knowledge for free!

And that knowledge is what I'm afraid to loose now. I find less and less motivation in going out and answering the worlds most asked questions, and helping randoms online when this knowledge is now considered someone else's copyright to take, and I'm afraid this feeling is just going to multiply but the thousands and kill this good thing we've got going on.

Motivation to host, motivation to answer. I accept the internet is not a charity, and hosting forums costs money.

Money that is obtained by the advertisement shown on those sites.

And advertisement that is shown and paid for because of the popularity of said forms.

Popularity that is granted by the wealth of information published, and the eyeballs that land there in seek of that information.

And Information that is posted there, and not "over there" because of the selfless interest of all poster-users who know their knowledge will be shared to the most amount of people.

Benefit the most amount, because anyone seeking help is not having to pay to read this little bit of knowledge, because search engines will send people there, because this forum is very "popular," and because many more are also answering the same questions and expanding all this knowledge.

And very popular indeed because everyone is welcome and all said is shared and even those who are not typing their questions here are getting these same questions answered by the years and years of knowledge contained in this thread of back and forth questions and answers.

I know it is hard to estimate, but I guess the benefit to society, and the use of that knowledge must be exponential – even factorial.

Millions upon millions of developers are self taught like me. Many more have started, learned, and progressed in their skills and their software applications by combing through questions and answers and gotten un-stocked by obscured answers in multipage-forums in random places of the internet.

Those forums provided an additional wealth that is not visible in the now quick-answer offered by search engines and LLM's. They offered context. The struggling context of possible solutions all unsuccessful, but that built up extra knowledge until the one true solution came up around.

I've found solutions to many of my many-troubles in the middle pages of multipage forum threads, by combing through all of them, because not all problems are alike, not circumstances are alike, and not all contexts are alike. There's no one-solution fits all. There's never been, there's never will.

I've also found solutions by sticking together answers from several forums in one. An impossibility if all those forums now hid behind a wall. Because it has been the sum of the little bit of knowledge from each independent site that provided me with the answer, not one site with the one answer.

All that by paying with my eyeballs and the eyeballs of millions others that allow those forums to run thanks to pay-per-click ads, and advertising.

In my 20 years of career, I've done from simple web 2.0 websites, to Social Media clones, to PBX installations, to POS development, to Magento dev, to iOS dev, to ERP software dev, to Warehouse management systems, to web scraping, to building up networks, to installing Windows servers for the 1st time, etc.

And I can guarantee that in the many struggles while doing any of those, I've visited random forum sites only once in my lifetime. Only once because only once did I need that piece of information.

And I can guarantee, however, that I'm not the only case. I can guarantee that there are millions like me that have done alike, and we all have disseminated our eyeballs into thousands of other sites helping them a little bit with our visit and our pay-per-clicks on their ads.

I'm afraid today because more and more of those eyeballs are now getting concentrated in single sites. LLM's running sites that are now wall-gardening their users, keeping them confined by magician tricks, and by playing to our must human condition: laziness.

What's going to happen when all of those obscure forums stop getting eyeballs and their bills pile up, and they come crashing down into an infinite ball of burning HTTP 404's setting all possible knowledge on fire?

I've been told that before the 90's, before Linux was the de-facto server, before open source was all-rage, all knowledge was walled in and bolted inside expensive corporate agreements with IBM, and the like. Compilers costed tens-of-thousans of dollars, and tinkering your way into $100,000 salaries was just a dream, and the lottery of just a handful.

It seems we are now going full circle. It seems now we are all happy looping our way back into the corporate walled garden.

Indeed, I worry about the state of free knowledge in the Internet today.