Sometimes I wonder - maybe websites were enough? Most people on most platforms are readers/consumers, not producers anyways. Maybe having a personal website was a good filter for publishing after all? Maybe personal websites + sites like hackernews that allows us to discuss our and other people's work is the best the Internet could be.
It depends; not everything that's newer is automatically better.
Web and websites did the heavy lifting of instant and world-wide information sharing.
With social media, open or closed, there are many non-obvious tradeoffs; I am not sure whether on the whole, we are better off with or without them - time will tell
Even if the information consumers are 99% of the users, making the features available for the content creators leads to much better content. Plus people want the ability to be able to post content if they need to. I shall point to the /r/ask* subreddits as an example.
