Or alternatively, then came Internet for the masses. Before that a lid was kept on a huge part of the population, the dream of raw global information sharing turned out to be a nightmare our societies/species is no ready for.
It's the "Eternal September" or "September that Never Ended" for the internet in general. With mass use came mass marketing and a switch from authentic information dissemination Internet to pure and absolute profiteering of everything you see on the internet.
Do a random search in Google (DDG, or Bing) of ANY term at all, and you will see that the full first page links to pages that wrote whatever content for a profit (either by selling ads, or by a paywall, etc).
Long lost are sites like Xoom, Geocities or similar where people wrote about their knowledge just for the sake of it. Long gone are the "web rings" that took you into cliques of people wanting to share knowledge of some specific subject.
Nowadays the closest you can get to that sort of information is in forums like this or reddit (and this last is questionable). That's why adding "site:reddit.com" when searching for some opinion is becoming more useful compared to pure serach engine results.
Wikipedia and community wikis also centralized (drained?) a lot of knowledge that might have otherwise existed on separately hosted sites linked through webrings.
