I feel that sites like Hacker News and Reddit are only becoming more important by the day. Platforms like these allow us to share links to independent sites — blogs above all — that exist outside of the walled gardens of the giants and have their own design, their own voice, and crucially far less moderation.
I'm sure age also has a lot to do with it, but it feels like the web has actually become smaller since the early 2000s. Part of that is thanks to search engines actually returning useful results nowadays, but a big part of it is also that, in so many contexts, if it doesn't exist on Facebook/Instagram/Youtube, then it's considered not to exist at all.
Unrelated: the most useless consequence (for me) is also the most salient: the lack of design on so many pages nowadays. Everything looks the same because everyone uses the same templates — if they have a choice at all.