It's too late. The culture of free exchange that existed on the usenet, over e-mail, and on the early web died circa 2013.
It's tempting to blame Google and Facebook, and they definitely converted a lot of public value into private value. But I suspect it's mainly down to self-selection bias of internet early-adopters. I call the present state of affairs "eternal October".
That's the year Google killed Reader, and all the mailing lists I'd been on since the '90s spontaneously moved to Facebook. I think it was also the year mobile really took off
The decline was definitely underway. 2010 is also the year Duke dropped usenet. But the blogosphere was still going strong and mailing list traffic was still strong. Facebook group versions of many mailing lists and private forums existed but discussions were high-quality and didn't cannibalize the parent forums much. Forum/list traffic collapsed in 2013 and meaningful Facebook group discussions followed about a year later.
It's tempting to blame Google and Facebook, and they definitely converted a lot of public value into private value. But I suspect it's mainly down to self-selection bias of internet early-adopters. I call the present state of affairs "eternal October".