And similarly untold masses that are and wouldn’t realistically be accessible to the ordinary person otherwise. If, for example, I’m trying to track down a short story I remember reading 30 years ago in an old copy of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction that was printed 20 years before that, I can ask the Dope and get an answer within hours, and with a little Googling find the complete text.
Trying to accomplish that same task in 1990 would have probably been impossible.
(On a side note, there’s something deeply ironic about using an online message board to argue that life would be better without the internet.)