What ruined the web is one word: monetization. Before it was used for fun, people weren’t looking at it as a source of income, unlike now, take YouTube for example, in ~2010 it was those amateur captured videos where people are just happy they can share some clips with the world, right now, you have “content creators” with their soulless faces and setup, all have the same LED setup, thumbnails with reaction-face pics…
Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curs…
He argued that he preferred 19th century literature because back then it wasn't (as much as in the 20th century) about becoming famous or rich as an author.