i only lament some things; others have gotten better. there's enormously more free software and better information, and disks are big enough for kiwix to be a thing. consider: wikipedia, openstreetmap, library genesis, sci-hub, the internet archive, bitcoin, stack exchange, tor, debian, termux, f-droid, and lineageos. heck, even firefox is noticeably better than lynx was when i joined the internet!
and, as i alluded to in my comment, it's not clear that people were ever purely altruistic; artificial reputational gain was always a consideration
and, as i alluded to in my comment, it's not clear that people were ever purely altruistic; artificial reputational gain was always a consideration