It was a good idea when it was super niche. And people were using MUDS and newsgroups.

As soon as marketing and capitalism figured out they could use it to control media content and sell it to the masses, we began down this road where we are now, with a few billionaire monopolies running everything.

It had two waves. The first was in the 90s and it was about access. Starting with dialup AOL, genie, prodigy and all those free CDs in the mail. Then the telecoms wanted in and that was that, for a while. Then in another ~10 years, since they couldn’t control access (as that was then universal) they had to control backend content, and now we have the billionaire monopolies in the services themselves, X, Facebook, etc.

It had a good run there for a while though.