The web was great back when it was mostly read-only. You could comment and share, but only via email, so only to people you likely knew. Yes, I remember chain mails from 1997, but those were rare, maybe 2x a year. You probably saw that many dumb posts in the last 5 minutes of scrolling Twitter/FB/IG.

Once social media replaced bookmarks, people went there to find new links. And eventually, when SM de-ranked posts with external links, more and more of the feed became about exclusively in-app material, which was echo chambers and arguments and abuse.