I don't think there are less good web now then it used to be. Just a lot more bad. There is not really any 1998 equivalent of modern facebook, twiter, amazon, youtube etc. Also a lot of "modern" or new websites and services is much less bloated then they where, say 10-15 years ago, due to keeping everything optimized for lowpowered devices with limited network (either slow or data-plans), these devices are called phones for some reason, stupid people sometimes even call them smart phones.

Back in the day, most of the users of internet (who where of a similar demographic and culture), didn't contribute more then a comment in some "guestbook". Content was mostly written by some geek who knew how to make and publish a website. Now everyone can contribute, and the demographics now is more or less everyone, not only western computer scientist who like phish and twin peaks. So for us, who are of that demographic, the web felt much comfier back then.

But as I said in the beginning, it is not that much worse, in many ways much better. Many more high quality articles and blogposts are created, even if they are not seen on facebook they are written and read, by the same type of people who would have read and written them back in 1998, and probably some more. We now have collaborative wikis, and things like github/lab/whatever is just great imo.

Just apply a filter, /ignore the bs, logout, and everything is fine.

Do you listen to music you don't like?
Do you eat food you think are disgusting?
Do you consume information, that makes you angry, sad or disappointed of the web (or humanity)...

edit.

I guess my point is, maybe we shouldn't focus on what's bad so much and instead focus on creating more good. I don't think facebook will persist for ever, maybe not google either and entities like those usually fall by their own mistakes (Bell labs, IBM, Microsoft, yahoo, myspace, atari, commodore, sega, etc etc. (i know, in one way these where all very different companies, and some are still very much alive today, but they where once the biggest players losing a single game and where removed from a market over night.), this will probably happen to google, facebook and twitter as well.

Steph: i don't see any link to your homepage in your profile ;)