And to be honest, as a person in the 20s sometimes seeing what the “old web” actually was through survived sites and archives… I really wonder if you guys were actually that better than the Internet today, I think a lot of positive thinking about the past is just nostalgia. I saw people were always fighting for Internet clout since the beginning, and all kinds of bland stupidity and toxicity happened through IRC, forums, and blogs. (And yes, the web was always plastered by awful ads since its inception.)
1. commercialization. Most properties that people engage in are monetized and thus algorithmically manipulated.
2. things were smaller. communities were smaller and had little spill-over into other areas. What someone said on some forum wouldn't get picked up by media[1] to amplify whatever it was.
[1] with the exception of "leaks" new CPU, VGA, Apple device, etc.
2) You can still find lots of smaller communities and websites (that don't get reported to the mainstream) today, probably even more than before. An incredible number of blogs, forums, niche subreddits, Twitter groups, fandom communities, Discord servers, you name it.
With most services having some kind of API “journalists” set triggers or scour for particular things so they can write about something scandalous two people said on some service somewhere so they can present it as zeitgeist.