I’d say it was weird, not shit. It was hard to find niche sites, but once you did they tended to be super deep into the hobby, sport, movies, or games.

SEO (search engine optimization) was probably the first step down this path, where people would put white text on a white background with hundreds of words that they hoped a search engine would index.

It had its fair share of shit and that gradually increased with time, but LLMs are like a whole new level of flooding everything with zero effort