Is link sharing... dead?

[Weltall]

I think part of why the internet has 'shrunk' is because we use it differently than we used to. Now, it's everywhere, all the time, in your pocket, whenever you want it. More of that internet use is for utility purposes; I wasn't paying bills or doing my job on the internet in the early 2000s. A lot of the rest is because the era of everybody having their own personal web presence and site is long gone. This isn't just about personal webpages, but also, if you want to find and join a community surrounding a game series or whatnot, more often than not, you'll look to reddit or something like it, because it will probably exist and there will probably be a lot of other people already there. Thus, less impetus to create communities and forums that are separate from the giant link aggregators and social media environments.

It definitely seems like Google, in particular, is far less useful and functional than it was back in its prime. It returns lots of reddit results, ads, and promoted links that often just re-appear two links down anyway.