Good point. The big difference between 1992 and today is the profit-seeking middlemen between the reader and most of the user-contributed content. These middlemen show ads, track people, require people to sign in and force people to shift their attention to the task of getting rid of modal dialogs (e.g., "sign up for our newsletter") before they will display the user-contributed content. They make it hard for the reader to concentrate on the current web page by showing many links to other web pages on the site or on the sites of the middleman's commercial partners. (Even Stack Exchange, named by another comment in this thread as one of the good middlemen, does that.) In contrast, navigating Usenet and the web of the 1990s was a lot more streamlined; to a greater extent than is possible today, a reader could stay focused on the user-contributed content or on his or her reading goal.

Of course there are middlemen today like Hacker News and Wikipedia that pretty much stay out of the reader's way, but they are the middlemen for closer to 0.1% of the user-generated content than 50% of it.