It depends on what you define as useful. 90's style personal websites/Usenet/BBS forums can be useful. People certainly gathered there to make significant thing

It depends on what you define as useful. 90's style personal websites/Usenet/BBS forums can be useful. People certainly gathered there to make significant things happen and to create useful resources. That said they're still pretty infotainmenty, the signal to noise ratio is still pretty low compared to a focus on an actual topic of interest that comes through deeply engaging with the literature and/or delving into making or building things with it. We have to keep to the logic that the internet is a conduit towards real life actions and the internet of the 90's already cut into that. In a sense, being bothered by the SEO means you are still in an infotainment mindset anyway or at least surfing the shallower waves. Today's internet has astoundingly accessible resources on all sorts of things. A motivated person can still sidestep all of the crap with relative ease. Or to put it another way, if they get lost in the shrubs, they weren't gonna make it in any case. Motivated people now have many more tools and platforms at their disposal to gather alongside one another and make things happen. The pre-September internet was more private, yes, but that was actually a massive flaw in an absolute sense. Now you can have a bright middle class Mongolian kid become an electronics expert on his own and the greybeards aren't barred from finding their watering hole either.