Wasn't that part of those years? Free webmail, free search, free articles, all with display ads?
The main thing I was thinking in regard to that last point was that while early community sites weren't perfect, there was at least some pressure to maintain community health. If I ran a site like photo.net I had to keep photographers interested — too many scam ads or bad behaviour and the most valuable people will stop visiting. Since you're running your own infrastructure, you have more options for differentiating your site and it was harder for spammers to make sleazy ripoff clones as is now common.
These days a lot of that stuff happens on places like Facebook or Twitter, where they will optimize for “engagement” with little interest in the health of a particular community and things are encouraged to leak across communities unless they reach the level where users stop using the entire service and/or advertisers stop buying ads. As long as people have a boredom behaviour of opening your app it's seen as working well.
I largely agree with this but I think there was a marked turn for the worse when advertising became the dominant business model for just about everyone. That had two problems: the obvious one being that selling directly to users meant you had to prioritize their interests but a secondary issue being that it trained most people to think of $0 as what just about any service was worth.
There's one other trend which I'd class as a bad trend getting worse. In the mid-90s the expected path for a lot of companies was to build a viable business. By at least 1999, arguably earlier, that had switched to “cash out in the IPO; who cares what happens next” and then the consolidation trend pushed that even further away from having to build a viable business to just having something that a fabulously rich company would buy as an aquihire, eliminate a potential strategic threat, or simply for the lavish bonuses handed out to the executives who signed off on it. As with pricing, that's not just wasteful but actively harmful for anyone who is trying to build a real business and has to compete with money being shoveled around by people who never have to worry about running out.