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The internet in the 90s seemed more fun and more open. Perhaps it's because the only people really participating were not interested in abusing sites or people. It was mostly nerds sharing nerdy things. Once money got involved, and free everything was available, it turned into this soup of bots, trolls, AI, fake this and that, big money, swaying public opinion, and gross content.The 90s had fair share of the above as well:
* bots: I used to write bots to troll 90s HTML chatrooms (I was young and an idiot). IRC bots have been around since forever at well.
* trolls: trolling is older than the web. Platforms like IRC and newsgroups used to be rife with trolls if you wondered into the wrong place or said something stupid to the wrong people.
* AI: this isn't really a web problem but more just a natural advancement of technology. I mean we had bots in the 90s so you can bet if AI was as far along then as it is now then we'd have seen AI then as well.
* fake this and that: this has always been a problem. Let's not forget that Snopes.com was launched in 1994.
* big money: The web definitely attacks big money now, but even in the 90s some businesses were sinking huge quantities of money in the bet that it would pay off big. Probably the most famous example being Amazon, who were founded in 1994.
* swaying public opinion: I agree here. This more recent trend of using user identifiable information to target persuasive pieces (eg what Cambridge Analytica were doing) is very worrying too.
* gross content: shock sites are nearly as old as the web itself. Goatse, for example, is so old it's now part of the mainstream consciousness.
* spam: Spam on forums is less of a problem now than it's ever been thanks to new techniques in user verfication (captcha and similiar, developers more aware to validate users with an activation email, etc). And spam email is an order of magnatude better now that it's been in years.
* sock accounts: To be honest I think this is another area where they were more common then than they are now. This time I think it is due to the current trend of using real world identities. In the late 90s it was particularly easy to create sock accounts due to how easy it became to create a multitude of free email accounts (eg Yahoo Mail).
* very often lose out to the big sites: this is where I think the biggest shift has happened. People seem less interested to stumble on new content than thye did in the 90s. Of course this might just be age bias on my part; I was in college in the 90s so had both the time and the social crowd to stumble upon random stuff online. Whereas these days I'm older and look for different requirements from the web so for me I look to it more as a tool than a toy.
I'm not saying things are better now nor then (actually I do kind of miss the 90s web) but there was definitely still a darker undercurrent present even in the 90s.