"
but because the internet opened up to non weird people"
For my tastes, the original blogosphere of 2000-2008 was one of the finest things the human race ever created, and the intellectual stimulation of the debates has no equal in any other age. But also there was still plenty of weirdness. I'd extend the era of "early Web" all the way to 2008, and I'd focus on advertising as the thing that killed it. In 2000 advertising on the Web meant banner ads, which had the reputation of being over-priced and ineffective. Especially when the crash hit in 2001, many companies swore they would never again waste money on advertising on the Web. But Overture came up with the idea of buying keywords for specific searches, and then Overture was absorbed into Google and became the Google business model, and by 2007 or 2008 many businesses were willing to get serious about advertising on the Web. At which point advertising, as a business model, took off, and it helped drive the consolidation of the Web, and it helped give us the boring Web of today.
I should add, the worst aspects of the consolidation were driven, specifically, by the adoption of algorithms that are designed to maximize engagement, because the goal is to serve as many ads as possible. The algorithms have a deadening effect. To his endless credit, Clay Shirky sketched out some of the forces that were likely going to lower quality on the Web over time:
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/powerlaw_w...
That was way back in 2003. The key passage is:
"Finally, there is no real A-list, because there is no discontinuity. Though explanations of power laws (including the ones here) often focus on numbers like "12% of blogs account for 50% of the links", these are arbitrary markers. The largest step function in a power law is between the #1 and #2 positions, by definition. There is no A-list that is qualitatively different from their nearest neighbors, so any line separating more and less trafficked blogs is arbitrary."
But this turned out to be incorrect:
"Third, the stars exist not because of some cliquish preference for one another, but because of the preference of hundreds of others pointing to them. Their popularity is a result of the kind of distributed approval it would be hard to fake."
The algorithms are designed to fake a kind of preference, or to distort those preferences, because of the desperation of the company to move higher on the power law curve.
The point is, Shirky pointed to a natural process, and advertising money provided a powerful incentive to hack that natural process and try to distort it for the benefit of the company.