I do agree and disagree, yes there were more diverse websites for sure, but quite a lot of it were just copies of others (flash games is a good example of how many different hosts there were with almost nothing unique to it).

And two of the examples you brought up are social media focused, with one also being heavily focused on content discovery.

And the places you did find was very slow with new content being added and limited because as I said you could mostly only get the juicy stuff through piracy (as most things was still heavily reliant on offline distribution).