Tools have been built to help amateurs better share what they want. I guarantee Tumblr + Posterous + Weebly + fanfiction.net + wikia have far more 'amateur' sites and content on any topic you're interested in, than the entire internet in aggregate in 1994.
+1, very good point. The discovering these sites is much harder than in 1994. Professional sites dominate search to a degree that finding amateur sites requires much more work.
