I think there is way more amateur content published today by passionate users, it just doesn't look amateurish. Wikipedia is the canonical example.
There are tons of users on tumblr and flickr which are passionate about photos. Such photo sites were very rare in the old web.
Blogger, Wordpress and YouTube has a lot of passionate amateurs posting high-quality content. asymco.com is a passionate amateur who provides better content than the professional media.
The old amateur web required users to do everything, including design. Most people can't design well (e.g. choose colors that fit well together). So most people ended up with creating square wheels or "see my 'leet skillz" designs.
The old web was a small village: very small selection of shops, but you knew all of them. The new web is a huge city: shops for everything under the sun, the problem is finding out which shop that sells the stuff you want to buy.
There are tons of users on tumblr and flickr which are passionate about photos. Such photo sites were very rare in the old web.
Blogger, Wordpress and YouTube has a lot of passionate amateurs posting high-quality content. asymco.com is a passionate amateur who provides better content than the professional media.
The old amateur web required users to do everything, including design. Most people can't design well (e.g. choose colors that fit well together). So most people ended up with creating square wheels or "see my 'leet skillz" designs.
The old web was a small village: very small selection of shops, but you knew all of them. The new web is a huge city: shops for everything under the sun, the problem is finding out which shop that sells the stuff you want to buy.