Hard to live through what social media has done to society over the past decade without at least entertaining the idea that the higher barrier to entry of being online was maybe not a bad thing.
The problem is that the barrier to entry got too low, so it was necessary for large companies to interpose themselves between producers and audiences, starting with google (becoming something other than a grep for the web, and instead becoming the editor and main income source for the web) and expanding outwards into facebook.
Remember that we started with walled gardens like AOL and Compuserve, and the web (and the end of those companies) was people desperate to break out of them. Now people have been herded in again since the indexers bought the ad companies.