> What changed is that people want to make money with the web

People always wanted to make money on the web, but the sites of people that didn't still appeared in search results. Now search result positioning depends on the amount of ads you're prepared to host. So, the people who are optimizing for revenue are listed way above the people who aren't optimizing at all and are just creating.

There are times when I've searched for a tumblr page literally by the exact and totally unique name and still not found it on the 3rd page of results, all of which were unrelated garbage.

They've decided that they'd rather piss you off than lose money sending traffic to sites that won't pay to play. It's toxic.

That is true. The initial wave was driven by the sheer excitement of being able to “publish”. I do think that the ad supported model is still responsible for what happened next. Ads encourage optimizing for eyeballs and traffic vs quality. And that’s exactly what happened. The good stuff was buried by the ad optimized garbage everyone is complaining about.

Btw, I’m not dogmatically against ads. I believe they serve a purpose and are necessary. Just pointing out the side effects.