Is the internet even a net benefit with this current trend towards turning everything into clickbait or some other psychological experiment to get traffic and harvest data off of it? How useful is the average website now compared to what the internet was like in the 2000's?

Even if it would all be a net benefit, why is it ok for all of these companies to be so misleading about it. No one out a simple EULA, for what is happening with the data. Hell half the agreements just say that the companies can do whatever with the data, but an average person does not have the ability to parse the output of the legal teams of every company they interact with every day. The only way this could get even close to an equal footing between users and companies is if every single person was a lawyer

The rate of high-quality content being added to the internet has surely been on the increase as the adoption of the web increased, even if the likes of clickbait and spam grew faster, shifting the "average" quality down.

I don't agree with that at all. In the 2000s I frequently could find new and useful websites for learning on every Google search. Now I have to wade through hundreds of sites that only host clickbait or repackage other sites content so they can deliver ads that end up containing malware. The internet has given me a commodity in the form of constant good data that is unequivocally an improvement, but the signal to noise ratio on the web has gotten worse every year

I'm not seeing exactly where you disagree there. There's more bad information now, and a higher ratio of bad to good, but I'm saying despite that, there's still more good than there used to be, and probably a higher rate of good being added.

For example, with small numbers for the argument's sake, say in 2000 there were 5 good webpages and 4 bad webpages added to the internet every day. Now there are 10 good webpages and 50 bad webpages added every day. That would mean we're getting more good information per day than before, but the signal to noise ratio has gotten worse, as you said.

I'd agree that the total amount of good information has increased but if bad infi is being added at an accelerating rate compared to good info then I wouldn't say the rate of good information is increasing in anything but the most technical sense.

For all intents and purposes the information doesn't exist if you can't find it, you can only find information as a certain rate, and a larger and larger chunk of that information bandwidth every day is bad information. The practical result is that the rate of good information someone has access to has decreased even if the total system has a nominally higher rate