Unfortunately, getting to their creations is ultimately harder: eg. searches for anything will now throw you at some lame stuff on pinterest, which will attempt to lure you into signing up just to find out if they have what you are looking for.
Basically, ability to really "browse" that humongous web is now gone. And most of those creations never reach their intended audience.
Could you explain how you got to that conclusion?
It would be impossible for non-tech-savvy people to share things on the internet if there were no omni-present surveillance, manipulation, and centralization, because ... ?
harder to use as publishing platform by who? don't you mean businesses & corporations?
people have always been fine. myspace anyone? geocities? irc? icq? aol? msn? yahoo? the list goes on... also the remarkable thing is that people just move to newer and better back then.
"It's bad that X has happened!"
"But Y has happened, too, and that is good!"
Yeah, so what? Unless Y happening is predicated on X happening, that is just completely irrelevant to the discussion?
There's certainly many problems with something this gargantuan, but I get very skeptical when people nostalgize and eulogize "the good old days" of anything.
I'll add, I say this with empathy to your feelings. I regularly feel a very strong nostalgia for those late nights of discovery on the Internet. But I do recognize that Internet involved a fraction of a fraction of the people using it today who are discovering and creating and sharing all kinds of stuff with greater ease than ever before.