Sort of feels like some of the dream around “free and quality information sharing” died between 2000 and now.

On the plus side, Stack Overflow is a huge improvement over what came before and seems to have a sustainable model in that they found a win win. Smart people answering questions make good job candidates and companies will pay to access them.

But plenty of other content areas have been completely corrupted to the point where quality content hardly exists at all. Rather, all content is an advertisement, or if not all, then enough to swamp the search results.