I think your average geek used to be like, somewhat academic and erudite and into arcane knowledge and had some level of good faith of wanting to engage in discussion
Now it’s all frauds and absolutely braindead elon stans and crypto dipshits and conservative freaks and people who enjoy and defend watching big tech destroy everything.
It’s a tale as old as Capitalism. People who geek out about something do it because they enjoy it, then somebody finds a way to improve distribution of their work and suddenly there’s a skyrocket in demand. Vultures swoop in and suck out whatever life might be left in their passionate work to make it profitable, and then all the passion is gone.
“Tech bro” is the term used to describe those vultures. People who try to monetize the shit out of everything with an ounce of human soul in it. Passionate tech nerds are still out there, mostly in FOSS circles, some in hardware hobbyist circles building cool form factors for their own computers.
Honestly, odds are you’ll find passion only in someone who’s not looking to monetize.
I think it’s important to note the difference between “make a living to keep things going” vs. “I want to make ‘fuck you’ money.”
I have no problem with people who make a good product and seek donations or sell their product at a reasonable price.
Hell, take uBlock Origin. I’d easily pay $10 / month for this but they do not want money. So I do what they request and donate to the people who make the filters.
This is the first year in perhaps a decade I won’t be giving to the Mozilla Foundation because they are enshittifying their product. I wrote to them and told them why I won’t be donating. I don’t know if it will make a difference but I’m keeping an eye on them over the next year.