How the hell did internet get so fucked in such a short amount of time?
I think about this a lot... I've been on the internet since the 1990's, starting with IRC and personal sites connected by webrings and hosted on Angelfire or Geocities, and moving on to ICQ, Livejournal, Fark, Habbo, Gaia Online, Friendster, Something Awful, DeviantArt, Newgrounds, 4Chan, Myspace, Facebook, and Reddit.
To put it in perspective, I was already out of university by the time YouTube was first introduced.
Anyways, over the last 25 years I've seen a constant and exponential decline in the quality of content online, above and beyond what can be ascribed to the Eternal September alone.
You used to be able to find something as simple as a solution to a technical problem to a recipe or tutorial instantly, the only people posting these things were experts in their field with something to offer and nothing to gain, while now you have to wade through mountains of bullshit
Part of the blame can be attributed to commercialization, but mostly it's the introduction of children, housewives, and the great unwashed masses of humanity to what once was a refuge of nerds, academics, and other social malcontents.
This was the internet that brought us Rotten and Ogrish, where people traded the Anarchist's Cookbook and posted media and opinions that newspapers and television would NEVER allow in their respective mediums.
From about 1995-2005 the internet was really only accessible by people who had a personal computer - by the year 2000 only 51% of Americans had a computer in their home, and only about 40% of them were online.
There was no massive corporations engaging in censorship, because there was no money to be made there, and the government was uninterested in regulating anything posted online (not that they would be able to do so anyways).
Now nearly every person on the planet has a phone that can get their blathering nonsense onto the web in seconds.