Every site was different and had a sense of wonder and discovery associated to it.
Back then, I used to go to page 10 of my search engine and still find interesting gems.
Nowadays days I just append “site:reddit.com” to try to dodge the SEO fulled blogspam hell, gobble the information and move on with my day.
I still think fondly of browsing lspace.org (Discworld) and the Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5.
I feel like it's often harder to find high-quality focuses resources like this at this point. I'm not sure whether that's because people have stopped making them, or whether they're just competing for clicks with exponentially more common (and more SEOified) junky fan-wiki sites, or what. (I still get a steady trickle of traffic to my Tolkien Meta-FAQ (http://tolkien.slimy.com/), but I gather that Google tends to de-prioritize sites that aren't being constantly updated.)