I used to work at a company that pivoted into "growth hacking" and it seriously made me sick how at the end we had 1500 freelancers being paid peanuts to write about subjects they had minimum knowledge about, using other similarly shallow articles as their only reference.
Today I can't search anything on the internet without coming across those. It's always the same: a shitty Wordpress blog and a 1500-word article with 1% of the depth of a Wikipedia Article. And some people have the gall to distrust Wikipedia when believing those.
We have 50 websites for lyrics and guitar tabs but they are 10% content (and it's always copied from somewhere else, or each other) and 90% advertisement.
If you look for software you're are either gonna get legitimate companies (Download.com) trying to inject you with install-spyware, or piracy blogs trying to infect you with legitimate malware.
Not really - I still use forums (that use my native language) and they feel great! way better than Reddit and have significant active user base.
I used to love it so much. It's what taught me my current career and brought me financial independence.
If I could press a button and erase Apple, Google, Facebook, and Twitter from existence I would. It's all trash.
The "old" Internet is still out there, at places like https://tilde.town.
Forums and the communities they fostered are dead. Their replacement, Reddit, has a structure that favors the hive mind.
There are ads everywhere and they swing between downright creepy (ads about what you were searching for an hour ago) to completely awful (semi-pornographic Taboola/Outbrain ads). When they're neither of these things, they are just plainly deceptive (sponsored content).