Maybe people should resume doing it.
PS. "back in the day" does makes it sounded old, but it was just 15 years ago or so.
"It is in this vein that I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of [sci fi] is crud. The Revelation:
Ninety percent of everything is crud."
As the amount of content on the internet grows dramatically, that 90% appears much larger. The problem of finding the good 10% does not scale proportionately.
Therefore, I fully believe the ratio of good:bad content remains the same as it ever was (~1:9), but sifting through the "crud" is much harder and will continue to grow harder. Perhaps exponentially.
As a result, I find it so hard to find genuine experiences through web search now. It's all just USAToday, CNN, NYTimes, Webmd, etc. media sites (which are themselves mostly just affiliate marketing/advertising plays, so maybe that wasn't Google's motivation).
I miss the days of searching the web and finding content written by real humans.
The only search I find that satisfies this consistently is Reddit (especially searching google with site:reddit.com)
Check out http://indieweb.xyz
The premise of the IndieWeb aligns closely with what you just described I think.