On the contrary, I would argue that the content quality is drastically lower because of optimisation for revenue and much less purer motivations.
The video quality is really much much better though. Original video scene is great as the business side of the things is a solved problem. Yet again, it suffers from optimisation for advertisers as less and less things are kosher.
Oh and the movie scene is terrible IMHO as a whole, despite having some amazing movies. Netflix is also optimising and the most optimum content for the business of Netflix is often not that optimum for many people. Not many tall poppies came out of it.
It's funny how a pop singer made a song about our optimised happy lives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um7pMggPnug
I think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, but that doesn't mean there's less signal; there's just a lot more noise.
Back in the 80s and 90s you were cherry picking the elite and the intellectuals, the internet of back then was never going to be representative sample of humanity
20 years ago there were definitely less garbage on the Internet, and less gems as well.
But I definitely agree with the movie part. We still get a few good ones here and there but it's kind of rare nowadays :(
The current internet content is made for the internet. A lot of great things were made of course but I think the optimisation is diluting it into mediocracy. Every single day it gets more and more optimised for revenue or influence through time dominance. If you pay for it, it is designed to keep you pay for it(not necessarily pay for it and consume it but keep paying. Games are mostly freemium where you pay if you want to enjoy, movie subscription services will pile sh*t in font of you to give you the impression of endless content, optimize scenarios for retention etc.). If it is free, it is designed to pay by proxy(purchase something or give political power to an interest group).
Go back past the search engines, and most knowledge simply wasn't on the internet yet.
People used to have big desire to meet each other and exchange information. Internet evolution has throttled that desire greatly, we don't have one to one or group conversations any more, not nearly as much as we used to, social media & mainstream access are the culprits.
We can have one thing without losing the other.
But the quality of even photos have been downgraded since phones.
A key reason this is because of "weirdness budgets". If I independently arrive at a solution and try to communicate that to you, the more work it takes to verify(so I can easily tell you some prime factors, but not say uhh.. UFOs exist) the result and the more different it is from your prior, the less likely it is to succeed.
This is magnified by the n ( n - 1) / 2 cost of communications, where n is the number of people. We all have different norms, and it's nearly impossible to work out where another persons norm is within a single comment, so mostly people surpass your weirdness budget and you ignore them.
This means that we can only meaningfully talk about things that the general public are on the same phase of. This is just another way to state the Overton window. But now that we understand what creates the Overton window, we can attempt to evaluate what we can do to mitigate it.
Now when we evaluate Facebook, reddit, YouTube comments, HN, message boards, BBS, and 1720 Venice coffee shops we can see them for what they are. The more you bump into the same people, the more nuance you can find. Nuance is where the insights really come from. No one can work it out themselves.
Another depressing reality is that when you do find a tight-nit community that is able to create these insights, all you have done is segmented yourself from the general public's Overton window. Now your just another weird LISPer, and the Java programmers that have libraries and drivers behind their projects will run circles around you even though you are correct. Correctness isn't enough.
1) Easy access to many high quality contents. For example HN is a good platform for accessing new knowledge. Note that I say "access", not "learn". Reading HN sometimes give people the false impression that they are learning new knowledge, which usually is not the case. I treat HN as a platform to get a peek at certain new knowledge, but reading books, watching videos and most importantly implementing it by myself, IMO, is the only true way to learn.
2) Fast enough to view high quality videos without any delay. Again this is related to learning new things. It is also important for me because it's one of the few ways that I entertain myself.
3) This might be arguable, but getting knowing a lot of different people from different places is a lot fun. People who comes from different culture usually have different standard of "good", "bad" and other moral judgment and it's fun to read all of those. This was doable 20 years ago but far fewer people were online at the time.
4) It's a lot cheaper. 20 years ago only a company can afford something faster than 1M (back then I had a 56K Modem I think but can't be sure) in my country and it was very expensive even for the modems. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to some high speed internet. Even if they cannot afford a computer (which is actually a rare case), they have Internet access through mobile phones.