Almost all of the interesting content I consume online comes from personal self-build blogs, HN or real news papers like the NYT.
I don’t think the content is worse, especially not when you pay for news. Now the NYT is a poor example of this, but the Danish equivalents, Information and Weekendavisen are not, in that one turns off it’s advertising when you subscribe and the other is simply not available for free.
I think in terms of the internet, you get what you pay for. For news the price is money, on HN the price is your ability to be relevant and fair and on personal blogs the price is the time it takes to find them, support them and make interesting responses to them.
The key thing that has changed for me, is how to find interesting things. HN is really the only option I know of, unless you get extremely lucky on a search engine. Because modern search results are so influenced by Alexa rankings and advertising that they very rarely lead you to the gems on the net. I do think the amount of shitty content on the internet, and unregulated/moderated social media makes the problem a lot worse, because it’s harder to find interesting things in an ocean of shit. But ultimately, I think there are as many interesting things on the net as there has always been.
I do find it interesting, that none of the websites I love the most, are powered by any of the popular JavaScript frameworks, well aside from the NYT, but to be fair, the thing I dislike the most about the NYT is it’s intrusive JS.