That’s a rose tinted view. For some fields (not unsurprisingly nerdy ones) the quality of the amateur content was good enough. For other fields it was abysmal. I remember trying to look up scholarly material on English literature in 1998 or so and not being able to find anything that was even remotely decent, for example. And it could have been worse: among the amateurs that put history related material online, crackpots and conspiracy theorists were (and, in fact, are) vastly over represented.
It's ok that some content not be on the internet. The internet didn't have to become the epicenter of everything. Amateur content and communication was a fine outcome for what the internet could have been. Scholarly material could remain in journals.
